“I love the poorly educated,” Donald Trump famously boasted in early 2016 as he started racking up victories in the Republican primary election. It was an unintentionally hilarious thing to say, but it pointed to a truth that’s since became undeniable: People with less education are more likely to vote for Republicans.

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MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, these are some very sensitive topics to people that we're going to be discussing here today. It's no fun for people to discuss cognitive ability and political ideology if you are the group assessed to have lower cognition at least outputs. But before we get into that, though, I did want to ask you—and to clarify that because the brain is a highly plastic organ and cognition is a form of exercise, these are not necessarily judgments that are set in stone, if you will. And this research is still just beginning in a lot of ways, right?

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SHERKAT: Absolutely. I mean, we're seeing this mostly in our gerontological research about, kind of use it or lose it. That if you don't think about things in systematic ways, then your brain will not operate as it should in an ideal way.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And also, I have to also say that, myself as a former fundamentalist Mormon and former Republican activist, this is me talking about my former self. And I can say, when I reflect back on my earlier life, when I had these belief systems, they did inhibit my ability to think clearly and to fully perceive the world accurately. That actually was something that, that did inhibit me.