Social conservatism. In both the NCDS and the BCS, socially conservative ideology was assessed in terms of respect for and submission to authority (7 items in the NCDS and 10 items in the BCS; e.g., “Give law breakers stiffer sentences” and
“Schools should teach children to obey authority”) and support for conventional (i.e., unequal) sex roles (6 items in both studies; e.g., “Family life suffers if mum is working fulltime”); scale reliabilities ranged from .63 to .68 (Deary et al., 2008; Schoon et al., 2010). These measures tap socially conservative values, including desire for law and order, punitive reactions toward wrongdoers, adherence to social conventions or traditions, and social control. Without reference to racial out-groups, these items reflect ideological orientations rooted in resistance to change and a desire to maintain existing social stratifications, making them ideal for our purposes.
Racism. Attitudes toward racial out-groups were assessed in the NCDS and the BCS with the same five items (e.g., “I wouldn’t mind working with people from other races” and “I wouldn’t mind if a family of a different race moved next door”; αs = .82; Deary et al., 2008; Schoon et al., 2010). Items were reverse-scored; higher scores indicate a generalized antipathy toward racial out-groups, rather than antipathy toward a specific racial group.
Results from both the NCDS and the BCS supported each component of the hypothesized mediation model (see Table 1). For both men and women, the NCDS data demonstrated significant negative paths from the latent g factor in childhood to the latent conservative-ideology factor in adulthood (Path a) and significant positive paths from the latent conservative-ideology factor to generalized racism in adulthood (Path b). As predicted, without the hypothesized mediator in the model, the direct effect of the latent g factor in childhood on adult racism (Path c) was negative and significant, but this effect was attenuated in magnitude and reduced to nonsignificance (Path c′) when the latent conservativeideology factor was included. Of the total predictive effect of childhood cognitive ability on adult racism, between 92% and 100% was indirect, mediated via conservative ideology (see Table 2)
Bookmarks