What do some of the sharpest minds in Brazil think about politics? A new exploratory study has tried to answer that question by listening to 100 volunteers with high abilities or giftedness, drawn from different regions of the country. The survey was carried out in October 2026, in the middle of the Brazilian election period, by the Centro de Pesquisa e Análises Heráclito (CPAH), with institutional support from the Infinity International Society (IIS) and the Gifted Debate project.
The participants were linked to some of the best-known high-IQ societies in the world, including Mensa, Intertel, the IIS, the Triple Nine Society (TNS) and ISI. The researchers wanted to map their political leanings, but also to understand whether those leanings differ in people who are both gifted and living with a neurodevelopmental condition such as ADHD or autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a combination known as twice-exceptionality.
The overall picture shows a right-leaning majority. According to the published results, 52.6% of the volunteers identified with the right, 21.1% with the left and 10.5% with the center-left. Libertarians, centrists and apolitical respondents each accounted for 5.3%.
The most intriguing finding appeared when the researchers cross-checked political orientation with twice-exceptionality. Among participants on the left, 100% reported ADHD alongside giftedness. On the right, 40% declared twice-exceptionality, divided into ADHD alone (20%), autism alone (10%) and autism combined with ADHD (10%), while the remaining 60% reported none. In the center-left group, nobody did. When only twice-exceptional participants were considered, the balance was perfect: half identified with the right and half with the left.
The study also looked at what drives these choices. Among those on the right, 50% pointed to economic issues as their main motivation and 30% to pragmatism and management, while the other 20% gave different reasons. On the left, everyone named social issues. In the center-left, half highlighted skepticism toward the political system. In addition, 42.1% said the left-right divide only partly represents their thinking, and another 42.1% described Brazilian political debate as distorted.
The authors are careful about what the numbers can and cannot say. The research is observational, cross-sectional and exploratory, based on descriptive statistics and an online questionnaire that stayed open for about a week. The sample was voluntary and not probabilistic, so it does not represent all gifted Brazilians, and the neurodevelopmental conditions were self-reported. The figures describe the groups studied and do not show that ADHD or autism determines any political orientation. Nor did the researchers set out to prove that one orientation is intellectually superior to another.
For the CPAH, the results open the door to new investigations into the relationship between cognition, personal values, neurodevelopmental conditions and political behavior. Larger samples and inferential statistics could show whether these patterns hold in other groups.
I leave here the details of the study:
Title: Political preference and twice-exceptionality in individuals with high abilities/giftedness: a Brazilian exploratory study
Institution: Centro de Pesquisa e Análises Heráclito (CPAH)
Institutional support: Infinity International Society (IIS)
Date: October 24, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.66741/sys.2026.002
Full study: CPAH website