A new meta-analysis published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin might be an inconvenient fact then. Drs. Alexander Jedinger and Axel M. Burger, research scientists at the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Cologne, Germany, aggregated and analyzed 23 studies which explored if there was an association between cognitive ability and economic ideology. In total, the meta-analysis included over 46,000 participants from the U.S., the Netherlands, Britain, Sweden, and Turkey.

The outcome? Jedinger and Burger found a small (r = .07), statistically significant (p = .008) link between higher cognitive ability and economic conservatism, defined as “opposition toward governmental intervention in markets and the acceptance of economic inequality”. To paraphrase, smarter people tended to favor free markets.