Are libertarianism and autistic traits correlated?
24
Ṁ1092
2026
85%
chance

Here I mean libertarian in the American sense - the US Libertarian Party, Hayek, Mises - that kind of thing.

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As a small data-point: I took the results of the ACX-survey 2024, a comprehensive poll among readers of the Astral Codex Ten-Blog by Scott Alexander, and had ChatGPT analyze the results. The survey has a question on "Political affiliation", where "Libertarian" is one of the possibly replies. It also has a question on Autism with four possible answers. Below are the answers and the percentage of Libertarians among people who gave this Autism-answer:

I don't have this condition and neither does anyone in my family: 19.49%

I have a formal diagnosis of this condition: 19.35%

I have family members (within two generations) with this condition: 19.62%

I think I might have this condition, although I have never been formally diagnosed: 23.66%

I would say if you compare people with formal diagnosis against people who don't have the condition at all, it is essentially indistinguishable in this sample. It's interesting that the self-diagnosed autists have such a high score (23.66% of them are Libertarians). In general of course the readers of ACX are quite non-representative, as indicated by the rather high percentages.

Link to my ChatGPT analysis

Apparently not really, but i wonder if Aspegers is, autistics can be cognitively challenged while afaik Aspegers can't , and that might explain things on this graph.

Has any study been performed on these?

I have a sample of autistic and allistic people on Prolific that I gave a fragment of the autism spectrum quotient, empathy quotient, systemizing quotient, and sensory perception quotient.

If you want, I can give you their Prolific IDs to set up a followup study of their political views. I will publish the data soon, but I can also give you the data before I publish it more broadly, for convenience.

This is a clear yes. Refer to Jonathan Haidt's research on libertarian psychology. Libertarians score the lowest on EQ (Empathy Quotient) and the highest on SQ (Systemizing Quotient) among all political groups. In fact, libertarians were the only group whose Systemizing was higher than Empathizing (SQ > EQ). Extreme versions of this imbalance can be found in autism. As for a correlation between AQ (Autism Quotient) and libertarianism, it's harder to extrapolate, but I would still guess yes.

How would you resolve this?

predicts NO

@samb Yeah, it's going to be difficult to resolve unless someone does a study, which probably isn't going to happen.