Brexiteers have responded with fury to a new study claiming Britons who voted to leave the EU are less intelligent than those who voted to remain.
The largest of its kind, Understanding Society is a longitudinal UK household study with the aim of “capturing life in the UK in the 21st century”.
Academics at the University of Bath analysed 3,183 couples involved in the study, which recently added questions about how people voted in the 2016 referendum.
Among those surveyed for the research in the top 10 percent by a cognitive performance metric, 73 percent voted to remain in the EU. And in the bottom 10 percent by the same measure, only 40 percent did.
Reclaim MP Andrew Bridgen argued the study demonstrated evidence of “indoctrination of younger people”, pointing to the fact the “older and wiser” in our society tended to vote Leave.
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The Brexiteer told Express.co.uk: “This like so much in the legacy media is what they would like to be true and what they want you to believe.
“It may be true that people who are more ‘educated’ had a propensity to vote Remain at the referendum, but that is more down to indoctrination than any measure of intelligence.
“It is a fact that people of high intelligence ‘free and critical thinkers’ are often the ones who challenge the ‘official narrative’.
“It’s encouraging that in 2016 such individuals were still in the majority slightly. I hope given the many false narratives pushed to the public since the referendum, this remains the case today.
“The older and wiser in our society tended to vote to leave the younger and more indoctrinated tended to vote to remain.
“When the current narratives unravel as they shortly will, it will be interesting who is actually regarded as the wiser and more educated.”
Speaking about the study on GB News, comedian Leo Kearse said: “It’s like what like the Remain campaign did saying, ‘Oh the car production will drop by point eight percent over seven years if you take it to the third quarter’.
“Nobody cares, brainiac! I don’t want some Belgian nerd telling me what to do.”
Despite the study appearing to find a link between intelligence and voting intention, a scientist warned it was difficult to establish a causal relationship.
Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of statistics at the Open University, said the research cannot establish that those who were less intelligent were more likely to vote for Brexit.
He told the Times: “There’s an obvious temptation, perhaps particularly if one takes a certain set of views about the referendum, the campaign and its outcome, to assume that the finding of an association between measures of cognitive ability and the way people voted in the Brexit referendum means that having lower cognitive ability caused people to be more likely to vote Leave.
“While this research doesn’t rule that possibility out, it certainly can’t establish that it’s true.”
But Remainer Chris Dawson, from the University of Bath, claimed there was evidence for cognitive ability influencing voters’ capacity to spot the “misinformation” he claimed played a role in influencing the outcome of the referendum.
He said: “This suggests that something we all have to live with is essentially the result of people being able to spread fake information and fake promises that some people just couldn’t distinguish from reality.”
