PONE-D-23-06300Cognitive Ability and Voting Behaviour in the 2016 UK Referendum on European Union MembershipPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Baker,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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Major Revisions required

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PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

Major Revisions are required

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: 1. It's 2023 now. What's the point of the author studying the UK's vote to leave the European Union in 2016? What are the effects of these conclusions and research findings on the present?

2. In the fifth line of the second paragraph of the introduction, more than three authors, just list the first author and add et al. There are similar problems in the content behind the manuscript, the author himself checked it.

3. At the end of the introduction, the author puts forward the innovation of the manuscript, but the innovation is too little, so it is suggested to supplement it.

4. The footnote reference format of 4.2.1 is not correct.

5. 5.2.2 Whether the title can be considered as the independent variable.

6. The author's empirical results have achieved relatively good results, but there is no robustness test, and a robustness test needs to be added to prove that the results obtained by the author are robust.

7. The representation of the percentage in the manuscript is recommended to be unified. In some places, the symbol “%” is used, and in some places, the “percentage points” is used.

Reviewer #2: The paper titled; “Cognitive Ability and Voting Behaviour in the 2016 UK Referendum on European Union Membership” uses nationally representative data and a barrage of control variables to assess the link between cognitive function and voting behavior in the UK’s 2016 referendum on its membership in the EU. The findings are plausible and challenge the ideas that political behaviors of voters are solely a function of socioeconomic issues. The analysis is based on the premise that the period leading up to the referendum was characterized by a significant volume of misinformation and disinformation and it may affect the voter’s behavior. Moreover, it is obvious that higher cognitive ability and analytical thinking increase the propensity to detect and resist misinformation. Below are some of my observations. I could not understand why the author used cognitive ability and its constructs in the regression equations simultaneously. Would it not be causing multicollinearity problem? Moreover, I think cognitive ability measures may be highly subject to biasedness due to education level and discipline of the respondent. The results discussion is too brief and can be elaborated to make it clearer for the reader. It may improve the usefulness of the findings considerably.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Faisal Jamil

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Attachments

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Submitted filename: Observations and comments.docx

PONE-D-23-06300R1Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membershipPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Baker,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

==============================

Minor Revisions Required

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 19 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Verda Salman, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments :

Accepted for Publication

Minor Revisions Required

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The author has been modified according to the opinions put forward, and has answered it very carefully. Finally, it is suggested that the limitations and future prospects of the study should be added at the end of the article.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript has been improved significantly and allthe comments are incorporated to my satisfaction.

Reviewer #3: Thanks, interesting manuscript. I was invited to the second round of reviews.

This is a professionally prepared manuscript, the methods are good and the topic is relevant.

I only have three smaller but important suggestions, all of them should be implemented. Plus some minor.

(1) If I put it polemically: The message of the study is that a) being for Brexit is stupid and that b) the people who voted for Brexit are stupid. Stupid + stupid = super stupid. It also becomes clear what opinion the authors themselves represent. To moderate the whole thing rhetorically, I would mention a few names of prominent people who were in favor of Brexit, right at the beginning. For example: “The issue of Brexit was very controversial among the British public. Well-known celebrities like Mick Jagger (+ more names) were for it, others (a few names) were against it.”

(2) Absolutely: Present a correlation table with correlations (r between –1, 0 and +1) between all important variables, most importantly: between intelligence and Brexit voting behavior.

(3) Add the IQ scores of voters for and against Brexit and the IQ difference. If you don't have these numbers, then on a small z scale. What is the difference between the two in SD units?

Abstract:

Add for this sentence ”We find that higher cognitive ability is strongly linked to a preference for Remain at the individual level ([Pearson/Spearman] r=.??), that partner’s cognitive ability influences the respondent’s preferences ([standardized] beta=.??) and lastly, that having a cognitive ability advantage over one’s partner increases the likelihood of voting Remain ([standardized] beta=.??).”

Introduction:

Intelligence also has a positive effect (at the country level) on considering the interests of others:

Rindermann, H. & Carl, N. (2020). The good country index, cognitive ability and culture. Comparative Sociology, 19, 39–68.

Results:

Figure 1 would be also possible as a scatterplot? (Not only bar chart) Add the Pearson/Spearman correlation in the notes of Figure 1.

Good luck, this study will be well received.

Reviewer #4: The author has responded to all of the feedback provided by reviewers. This paper is now ready for publication.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Cognitive ability and voting behaviour in the 2016 UK referendum on European Union membership

PONE-D-23-06300R2

Dear Dr. Baker,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Verda Salman, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Accepted for publication

Reviewers' comments: