The genetics of beliefs
Nathan Cofnas wrote a great piece the other day, Beating Woke with Facts and Logic, which included this part: Beliefs Aren’t Genetically Determined Should we execute murderers? Raise taxes on…
Does intelligence have nonlinear effects on political opinions?
Back in March I published this study: Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2025). Does intelligence have nonlinear effects on political opinions? OpenPsych, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.26775/OP.2025.03.24 We sought to study intelligence’s relationship with…
My first politically motivated retraction
I finally managed to join the cool kids retraction club. The Scandinavian Journal of Psychology (SJoP) published a paper of ours about wokeness and mental health. I wrote about it…
Are right-wingers more accepting of lying?
Richard Hanania likes to emphasize how right-wingers (in the USA) are more accepting of lying, pointing to grievous examples from Trump, Musk, the usual scams and low quality ads on…
Danish women also don’t like nuclear power
Here's a fun analysis I did as a side-project. I have a dataset of ~620 Danes who took a long vocabulary test, as well as answered 30 political questions. One…
Wikipedia editors and politics
I've written a few times about the political bias (defined as deviation from population average) of journalists and academics. Earlier this year, I wrote about how one can study the…
Conspiracies and their believers
Summary Conspiracy theory has negative connotations of falseness, implausiblity or irrationality, but we also know many conspiracies are true, ranging from the ordinary criminal case (conspiracy to commit murder) to…
How strongly is leftism correlated with mental illness? Is it real?
Earlier this year, Finnish researcher Oskari Lahtinen published a new scale of wokism or critical social justicism: Lahtinen, O. (2024). Construction and validation of a scale for assessing critical social…
3 new Youtube lectures
I haven't posted on Youtube in a while, but since some people prefer audiovisual content, here's a gentle reminder of 3 recent videos I posted. Italian Economic Inequality Explained By…
The dimensionality of politics
Most political science research is based on a 1 dimensional model of politics: left vs. right. However, this model is actually and obviously false in a nontrivial way. Take studies…