Politics What does psychology tell us about the differences between liberals and conservatives?

[Maciamo]

I've selected a few interesting excerpts from the remarkable book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, by Robert M. Sapolsky. These are all from chapter 12: Hierarchy, Obedience and Resistance.

Foundation of Morality​

Jonathan Haidt of NYU provides a very different view. He identifies six foundations of morality— care versus harm; fairness versus cheating; liberty versus oppression; loyalty versus betrayal; authority versus subversion; sanctity versus degradation. Both experimental and real- world data show that liberals preferentially value the first three goals, namely care, fairness, and liberty (and, showing an overlap with Kohlbergian formulations, undervaluing loyalty, authority, and sanctity is in many ways synonymous with postconventional thinking). In contrast, conservatives heavily value loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Obviously, this is a big difference. Is it okay to criticize your group to outsiders? Rightists: no, that’s disloyal. Leftists: yes, if justified. Should you ever disobey a law? Rightists: no, that undermines authority. Leftists: of course, if it’s a bad law. Is it okay to burn the flag? Rightists: never, it’s sacred. Leftists: come on, it’s a piece of cloth.

Affective psychological differences​

Research consistently shows that leftists and rightists differ in overlapping categories of emotional makeup. To summarize: on the average, rightists are made more anxious by ambiguity and have a stronger need for closure, dislike novelty, are more comforted by structure and hierarchy, more readily perceive circumstances as threatening, and are more parochial in their empathy.

The differing views of novelty certainly explain the liberal view that with correct reforms, our best days are ahead of us in a novel future, whereas conservatives view our best days as behind us, in familiar circumstances that should be returned to, to make things great again. Once again, these differences in psychological makeup play out in apolitical realms as well— liberals are more likely to own travel books than are conservatives.

Social conservatives tend toward lower thresholds for disgust than liberals. In one study subjects were exposed to either positively or negatively charged emotional images, and galvanic skin resistance (GSR, an indirect measure of sympathetic nervous system arousal) was measured. The biggest autonomic responses to negative (but not positive) emotional images were in conservatives opposed to gay marriage or premarital sex.

Make a liberal tired, hungry, rushed, distracted, or disgusted, and they become more conservative. Make a conservative more detached about something viscerally disturbing, and they become more liberal. Thus political orientation about social issues reflects sensitivity to visceral disgust and strategies for coping with such disgust.

Implicit Factors Underlying Political Orientation ​

If political ideology is but one manifestation of larger internal forces pertinent to everything from cleaning supplies in the bedroom to ice cream consumption, are there psychological, affective, cognitive, and visceral ways in which leftists and rightists tend to differ? This question has produced deeply fascinating findings; I’ll try to corral them into some categories.

1. Intelligence​

Oh, what the hell? Let’s begin with something inflammatory. Starting with Theodor Adorno in the 1950s, people have suggested that lower intelligence predicts adherence to conservative ideology. Some but not all studies since then have supported this conclusion. More consistent has been a link between lower intelligence and a subtype of conservatism, namely right- wing authoritarianism (RWA, a fondness for hierarchy). One particularly thorough demonstration of this involved more than fifteen thousand subjects in the UK and United States; importantly, the links among low IQ, RWA, and intergroup prejudice were there after controlling for education and socioeconomic status. The standard, convincing explanation for the link is that RWA provides simple answers, ideal for people with poor abstract reasoning skills.

2. Intellectual style​

This literature has two broad themes. One is that rightists are relatively uncomfortable intellectually with ambiguity; this is covered below. The other is that leftists, well, think harder, have a greater capacity for what the political scientist Philip Tetlock of the University of Pennsylvania calls “integrative complexity.” In one study conservatives and liberals, when asked about the causes of poverty, both tended toward personal attributions (“ They’re poor because they’re lazy”). But only if they had to make snap judgments. Give people more time, and liberals shifted toward situational explanations (“ Wait, things are stacked against the poor”). In other words, conservatives start gut and stay gut; liberals go from gut to head.

How to tell liberals and conservatives apart​

If you really want to understand someone’s politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more important, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis- ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.