Election 2008 and the Voter’s Personality
Does your personality influence who you vote for? The short answer is yes.
Liberals and conservatives divide according to whether they prefer social stability (conservatism) or social change (liberalism). Conservatives are willing to defend current social inequities and preferred groups as justifiable or necessary; liberals view such inequities and preferred groups as unjust and requiring reform. To paraphrase Ambrose Bierce’s satirical view:
Conservatives are those who embrace existing evils,
whereas liberals are those who hope to replace them with new evils.
So some personalities crave social stability; others, social change – but what accounts for this? Personality is interior and private, with no direct access to the outside world (everything is filtered through the senses: one’s eyes, ears, touch, etc.). For that reason, each person creates a mental world that represents the real one to a greater or lesser degree. A person’s mental models guide her and how she perceives the world, including those social features she prefers or abhors.
As you might expect, liberals and conservatives see the world through the lenses of different mental models. Surveys indicate, for example, that on average, liberals, relative to conservatives, prefer atheists, tattoos, foreign films and poetry. They endorse gay unions, welfare, universal health care, feminism, and environmentalism. Conservatives, relative to liberals, prefer prayer, religious people, SUVs and they like their own fathers better. Conservatives endorse such things as our government, the military, the state they live in, big corporations, and most Americans.
The differences between liberal and conservative personalities may begin from birth. First-borns, relative to later-borns, identify more with their parents, predisposing them to a greater investment in authority and a preference for conservatism. Children pick up the attitudes of their own family, peers, and cultural groups. People who identify as working-class Catholics, hockey moms and NASCAR dads, acquire specific, persistent ways of seeing the world over time (their mental models); these models influence their likes and dislikes – including their political affiliations.
If individuals experience socio-political threats – such as 9/11 in the United States, or the Madrid bombings in Spain – their personalities will shift beliefs in a conservative direction, on average. Conversely, as people work as judges, social workers, professors, and in other careers for which an appreciation of opposing points of view is required, their personalities may become more liberal over time.
A person’s mental models also will be shaped by his internal motives and abilities. A person’s fear of death, for example, will predict greater conservatism (reflecting an enhanced need for security). Conversely, creativity, which entails the capacity to see solutions to problems, and empathize with others, exerts a small persistent influence toward liberalism.
Conscientiousness – the ability to exert personal self-control to the effect of meeting one’s own and others’ demands, and maintaining personal coherence – is related to conservatism. (It is possible to be high or low on both conscientiousness and creativity or just on one).
Whereas one’s need for simplicity, clarity, and certainty, promotes conservative mental models, one’s tolerance for complexity and ambiguity promotes liberal models. Our current conservative president, for example, often is described as remarkably uncurious; our most recent liberal president was (and is) sometimes described as complicated.
So our votes are an expression not only of which candidates are best -- the Republicans, Democrats, or those candidates of another party – but also of our own way of perceiving and thinking about the world and what is good or bad about it. Our personal perceptions and thoughts in this area (and others) have been shaped over time within our personalities.
Notes, Credits, and Further Additions. I regard personality as the individual’s organizing mental system; as such, a person’s political beliefs are a part of personality. A recent review by Jost, Nosek, & Gosling (2008) summarizes much of the work on personality and political ideology discussed here. S. S. Tomkins (1963) was among the first to convincingly connect personality to ideology (though not quite in this way). The relation between birth-order and conservatism was pointed out by Sulloway (various; see also Kemmelmeier, 2007); the relation of openness (creativity) and conscientiousness to political views were reported by Jost, 2006; that for death anxiety and conservatism was reported by Landau, Solomon et al, 2004 and Jost, Glaser et al., 2003 among others). That security threats enhance conservatism has been reported by many authors (e.g., Landau, Solomon et al, 2004; Jones, J. M. (2003, September 9). Seeing others’ points of view and liberalism are discussed in Hanson & Benforado, 2006). For more about our current president’s” lack of curiosity, see www.uncuriousgeorge.org.
© Copyright 2008 John D. Mayer
