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Can You Guess a Person's Politics by Their Personality? Psychologist Team Says Yes
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If your office is a mess, you're known as a chatty Cathy, and you consider yourself hard to scare, then chances are, you will be voting for Obama in six days. But your neighbor, an optimistic clean freak who prides himself on the fact that he has woken up at 5 a.m. every day for the last 10 years, is a likely McCainiac.
It may sound a little like political palm reading, but some social psychologists say personality and biology may form the basis of a person's political leanings. While there's no Republican or Democrat gene, researchers are coming closer to pinpointing fundamental psychological and biological differences between conservatives and liberals.
In fact, professor John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University, found that a map illustrating regional personality differences was surprisingly similar to the red state/blue state map of the nation. He says a deeper understanding of the differences between right-wing and left-wing psyches has the "potential not only for predicting electoral outcomes through the development of more sophisticated public opinion polling techniques, but also for figuring out what kinds of political campaigns are most likely to be effective in certain environments and for various constituencies."
Jost and his colleagues have been hard at work putting the American voter on the metaphorical couch. Their conclusions, thus far, have proven both illuminating and entertaining.
Chatty Democrats, Orderly Republicans
Conventional wisdom tells us that states with high population of city dwellers and minorities tend to vote liberal, while small-town white America sways conservative. But Jost and his colleagues, psychologists Peter J. Rentfrow, Jeff Potter and Samuel Gosling, wanted to delve deeper than demographics when investigating the blue state/red state divide. They felt that there was something much more fundamental at play: personality.
To test their hypothesis that regional personality differences account for whether a state bleeds red or blue, they gave online personality tests to almost 500,000 people across the nation. Using a 44-question survey, they were able to measure five key aspects of personality: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. (It's called the "Big Five" personality questionnaire, a test so popular it even has a Facebook application.) For example, respondents were asked to rate how anxious and easily upset they are (an indicator of neuroticism), and whether they consider themselves sympathetic and warm (an indicator of agreeableness), dependable and self-disciplined (a measure of conscientiousness) or open to new experiences and complex (openness).
Sure enough, researchers found significant differences in personality between states that voted Democratic versus Republican in the past three presidential elections. The best predictor of Democratic-voting states was a disproportionately high score on openness, which is associated with creativity, curiosity, intellectualism and tolerance of differences. Conversely, residents of Republican states scored disproportionately low on openness but high on conscientiousness, which is associated with tradition, self-discipline, following rules and being organized, dependable and responsible. The findings held true even after adjusting for sociodemographic differences. The connection between openness and Democratic voting was so strong that a mapped-out illustration of openness looked almost identical to red state/blue state maps illustrating the nation's voting patterns over the past three elections.
As for extroversion, blue-state residents rated themselves as "more talkative, enthusiastic, energetic and sociable and less inhibited, quiet and reserved than people living in red states," according to the study. One odd fact that came out of the study, for which researchers provided no analysis: States that chose Kerry as their man in 2004 scored high on neuroticism. Insert your own John Kerry joke here.
A blue state/red state map of Democrats versus Republicans is strikingly similar to a blue/red map that was done based on regional personality traits.
Jost has also researched what he calls the "behavioral residue" of these liberal and conservative personality traits. A team of three researchers, including Jost, Columbia University professor Dana R. Carney, and Gosling, professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You, found clues to people's political attitudes simply by observing their offices and homes. People who described themselves as political conservatives occupied rooms that were cleaner, more organized and more brightly lit, displaying the Republican trait of conscientiousness. The right-wingers were also found to have more cleaning supplies, calendars, postage stamps and laundry products. The liberal participants of the study, perhaps predictably, had more cluttered offices and bedrooms with more color. They also had a greater number of CDs and DVDs, and more eclectic taste in music and movies.
See more stories tagged with: voter, biology, psychology, conservative, liberal
Award-winning writer Maria Luisa Tucker has covered crime, courts, politics, mental health and housing for The Village Voice, AlterNet.org, the Santa Fe Reporter and several other publications. Visit her site.
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