Liberals and conservatives Running head: LIBERALS AND CONSERVATIVES The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind

Seventy-five years of theory and research on personality differences between political liberals and conservatives has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a “Five Factor Model” framework to this yield, we find that two traits, Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. In four studies we investigate the relationship between personality and political orientation using multiple domains and measurement techniques, including: self-reported personality assessment; explicit beliefs, values, and preferences; nonverbal behavior in the context of social interaction; and personal possessions and the characteristics of living and working spaces. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant. In general, liberals are more openminded in their pursuit of creativity, novelty, and diversity, whereas conservatives seek lives that are more orderly, conventional, and better organized. Liberals and conservatives 2 The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind For almost as long as social scientists have located political orientation on a single left—right (or, in the United States, a liberal—conservative) dimension, they have speculated about the personality characteristics that typify each ideological pole (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Costantini & Craik, 1980; DiRenzo, 1974; Eysenck, 1954; McClosky, 1958; Tomkins, 1963). As Tetlock and Mitchell (1993) have pointed out, it is possible to generate either flattering or unflattering psychological portraits at either end of the political spectrum. The important question, from a scientific point of view, is not whether any given theory is gratifying to left-wing or right-wing audiences, but whether it possesses truth value. Obtaining an accurate understanding of the personality needs and characteristics of liberals and conservatives has taken on added urgency in the current political climate, in which people from liberal “blue” states find it increasingly difficult to understand people from conservative “red” states and vice versa (see Bishop, 2004; Rentfrow, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, 2006). In this article, we draw on eclectic sources of data to investigate the degree to which historical speculations concerning the traits of liberals and conservatives possess genuine diagnostic utility, that is, empirical accuracy. We address three main questions. First, does political orientation covary with basic personality dimensions in the ways that have been suggested (but rarely tested) by psychological theorists over the past several decades? Second, what, specifically, are the differences (as well as similarities) between liberals and conservatives in terms of attitudes, tastes, and preferences, and how strong are they? Third, if there are indeed meaningful psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, how are they manifested in daily behavior? Theories of Personality and Political Orientation Influential theories mapping personality profiles to political ideology were developed by Jaensch (1938), Fromm (1947, 1964), Adorno et al. (1950), Tomkins (1963), Brown (1965), Bem (1970), and Wilson (1973), among others. In this section, we review a number of these perspectives, which span the last 75 years. All of these theories assume that specific “ideologies have for different individuals, Liberals and conservatives 3 different degrees of appeal, a matter that depends upon the individual’s needs and the degree to which these needs are being satisfied or frustrated” (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 2). Although the specific personality needs and characteristics under investigation (italicized below) have varied somewhat across cultural contexts and historical periods, we will show that the underlying contents identified by diverse theorists and observers converge to a remarkable degree. Early Theories, 1930-1955 Early accounts of personality differences between left-wingers and right-wingers focused largely on issues that would come to define the syndrome of authoritarianism. Roger Brown (1965) famously recounted the work of Nazi psychologist Ernst Jaensch (1938), who offered one of the first distinctions between two personality types with clear political significance. The J-type, according to Jaensch, was predisposed to make a good Nazi: “J made definite, unambiguous perceptual judgments and persisted in them... [he] would recognize that human behavior is fixed by blood, soil, and national tradition... would be tough, masculine, firm; a man you could rely on” (Brown, 1965, p. 478, emphasis added). By contrast, the SType was someone of racially mixed heredity and included Jews, “Parisians,” East Asians, and communists. As Brown observed: The S-Type [described a] synaesthetic: one who enjoys concomitant sensation, a subjective experience from another sense than the one being stimulated, as in color hearing. Synaesthesia, which we are likely to regard as a poet’s gift, seemed to Jaensch to be a kind of perceptual slovenliness, the qualities of one sense carelessly mixed with those of another... characterized by ambiguous and indefinite judgments and to be lacking in perseverance. . . . The S would be a man with so-called “Liberal” views; one who would think of environment and education as the determinants of behavior; one who takes a childish wanton pleasure in being eccentric, S would say “individualistic.” (Brown, 1965, p. 477, emphasis added) Adorno et al. (1950) accepted at least a few of elements Jaensch's (1938) description but viewed the aggressive J-type as a societal menace, an authoritarian, a potential fascist—not as a cultural ideal. The rightwing personality type was recast as rigid, conventional, intolerant, xenophobic, and obedient to authority figures. Brown (1965) noted that “What Jaensch called ‘stability’ we called ‘rigidity’ and the flaccidity and eccentricity of Jaensch’s despised S-Type were for us the flexibility and individualism of the democratic equalitarian” (p. 478, emphasis added). It is remarkable that such diametrically opposed theorists as Jaensch Liberals and conservatives 4 and Adorno would advance parallel personality theories linking general psychological characteristics to specific ideological belief systems, but this is only one of many historical volleys in the longstanding effort to understand the relationship between personality and politics. Members of the Frankfurt School—including Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Reich, and others— were strongly influenced by both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. From Marx they inherited the notion that ideology is derived from economic class interests and material conditions of the capitalist system. But to really understand the relationship between the individual and society and the allure of political and religious ideologies, these theorists needed a psychology. What was available to them at the time was Freudian psychology, and so the members of the Frankfurt School turned to Freud’s writings on character structure. For example, Freud identified one personality configuration that seemed particularly relevant to political orientation: The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combination of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate . . . ‘Orderly’ covers the notion of bodily cleanliness, as well as of conscientiousness in carrying out small duties and trustworthiness . . . Parsimony may appear in the exaggerated form of avarice; and obstinacy can go over into defiance, to which rage and revengefulness are easily joined . . . it seems to me incontestable that all three in some way belong together. (Freud, 1959/1991, pp. 21-26, emphasis added) Freud referred to this collection of traits—orderliness, parsimony, and obstinacy—as the “anal character” (see also Freud, 1930/1961, pp. 40-44) but one need not retain his scatological terminology to consider the possibility that these characteristics tend to co-occur. Indeed, Sears (1936) found in a sample of 37 fraternity brothers that peer ratings of a given individual’s degree of orderliness, stinginess (parsimony), and obstinacy, and were significantly intercorrelated at .36 or above (see also Hilgard, 1952, pp. 15-16). Fromm (1947) built on Freud’s conception of the anal character, but he renamed it the “hoarding orientation” and suggested that it was: “Conservative, less interested in ruthless acquisition than in methodical economic pursuits, based on sound principles and on the preservation of what had been acquired” (p. 81, emphasis added). Fromm described the hoarding character in some detail: This orientation makes people have little faith in anything new they might get from the outside world; their security is based upon hoarding and saving, while spending is felt to be a threat . . . Their miserliness refers to money and material things as well as to feelings Liberals and conservatives 5 and thoughts . . . The hoarding person often shows a particular kind of faithfulness toward people and even toward memories . . . They know everything but are sterile and incapable of productive thinking . . . One can recognize these people too by facial expressions and gestures. Theirs is the tight-lipped mouth; their gestures are characteristic of the withdrawn attitude . . . Another characteristic element in this attitude is pedantic orderliness . . . his orderliness is sterile and rigid. He cannot endure things out of place and will automatically rearrange them . . . His compulsive cleanliness is another expression of his need to undo contact with the outside world. (Fromm, 1947, pp. 65-66, emphasis added) Although much of this description seems critical, Fromm explicitly cited both positive and negative aspects of the hoarding (or preserving) orientation. The positive traits he listed include being careful, reserved, practical, methodical, orderly, loyal, and tenacious (p. 115). On the negative side, Fromm stressed that this personality type could be stingy, cold, anxious, suspicious, stubborn, obsessional, and unimaginative. Middle Era Theories, 1955-1980 Psychological investigations of the personalities of liberals and conservatives between 1955 and 1980 built on the earlier work on authoritarianism but pondered an ever-widening circle of traits. Daryl Bem (1970, pp. 19-21) described an unpublished study by Maccoby (1968) that set out to test Fromm’s (1964) theory of the left-wing “biophilous character” and the right-wing “necrophilous character”: A person with intense love of life is attracted to that which is alive, which grows, which is free and unpredictable. He has an aversion to violence and all that destroys life . . . dislikes sterile and rigid order . . . rejects being mechanized, becoming a lifeless part of machine-like organization. He enjoys life in all its manifestations in contrast to mere excitement or thrills. He believes in molding and influencing by love, reason and example rather than by force . . . At the other pole, there are individuals attracted to that which is rigidly ordered, mechanical, and unalive. These people do not like anything free and uncontrolled. They feel that people must be regulated within well-oiled machines. (Maccoby, 1968, p. 2, quoted in Bem, 1970, p. 20, emphasis added) Maccoby and Fromm constructed a questionnaire to measure these two personality poles and found that supporters of liberal and left-wing candidates in the 1968 Presidential primaries (e.g., E. McCarthy, N. Rockefeller, and R. F. Kennedy) scored disproportionately at the “life-loving” end of the scale, whereas supporters of conservative and right-wing candidates (e.g., R. Nixon, R. Reagan, and G. Wallace) scored disproportionately at the “mechanistic” end of the scale. Bem (1970) also noted that scores on this scale predicted liberal vs. conservative opinions on specific issues. The distinction between “life-loving” and Liberals and conservatives 6 “mechanistic” personality styles is noteworthy not only for its originality and the fact that it received at least some empirical support in the late 1960s, but also because of the fact that some features of the distinction (e.g., an attraction to unpredictable, unconstrained life experiences vs. self-control, orderliness, and mechanistic coordination) parallel other accounts of liberal vs. conservative personality styles, including Sylvan Tomkins’ (1963) theory of ideological polarity. According to Tomkins (1963), people adopt “ideo-affective postures” toward the world that are either leftist (stressing freedom and humanism) or rightist (focusing on rule-following and normative concerns). People who “resonate” with left-wing ideologies believe that people are basically good and that the goal of society should be to foster human creativity and experience. Those who “resonate” with right-wing ideologies, by contrast, believe that people are inherently flawed and that the function of society is to set rules and limits to prevent irresponsible behavior. These differences, according to Tomkins, have important implications for emotions and their control: The left-wing theorist stresses the toxicity of affect control and inhibition, and it therefore becomes a special case of the principle of minimizing negative affect that such control should be kept to a minimum . . . He is likely to stress the value both to the individual and to society of an openness and tolerance for intrusions of the irrational, of the Dionysian . . . The right-wing ideologist sets himself sternly against such intrusions and argues for the importance of controlling affects in the interest of morality, achievement, piety . . . he is for some norm, which may require heroic mobilization of affect and energy to achieve or which may require unrelenting hostility against those who challenge the good (Tomkins, 1963, p. 407, emphasis added) Like Fromm (1947), Tomkins saw advantages to both left-wing and right-wing personality styles. Whereas the former is associated with humanism, creativity, openness, and emotional expression (especially enthusiasm and excitement), the latter is associated with norm attainment, conscientiousness, and morality. Several studies have revealed that liberals score higher than conservatives on measures of sensation-seeking and imaginativeness (Feather, 1979, 1984; Levin & Schalmo, 1974), whereas conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of self-control and orderliness (Costantini & Craik, 1980; Milbrath, 1962; St. Angelo & Dyson, 1968). A “dynamic” theory of conservatism was proposed by Wilson (1973), who integrated the notion that there are emotional differences between liberals and conservatives with earlier work on dogmatism Liberals and conservatives 7 and intolerance of ambiguity. The gist of the theory is that politically conservative individuals are driven by a “generalized susceptibility to experiencing threat or anxiety in the face of uncertainty” (Wilson, 1973, p. 259). Wilson and his collaborators suggested that conservatism is determined by “genetic” factors such as trait anxiety, stimulus aversion, and low IQ, as well as “environmental” factors, such as parental inconsistency and aggressiveness, low self-esteem, and low social class. Sources of threat and/or uncertainty in the social world (e.g., death, dissent, immigration, complexity, ambiguity, social change, and anarchy) are likely to prompt conservative ideological responses, including conventionalism, ethnocentrism, authoritarianism, militarism, moral rigidity, and religious dogmatism. Much of Wilson’s account has received correlational support, most especially the notion that situational and dispositional factors that produce heightened psychological needs to reduce uncertainty and threat tend to be associated with proponents of conservative (rather than liberal) ideology (see Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003 for a meta-analytic review). Recent Theories, 1980-2005 Over the last quarter of a century, psychological accounts of differences between liberals and conservatives have focused largely on the dimension of open-mindedness vs. closed-mindedness. Building on earlier traditions of research on authoritarianism and uncertainty avoidance, numerous studies have shown that liberals tend to score higher than conservatives on individual difference measures of openness, cognitive flexibility, and integrative complexity (e.g., Altemeyer, 1998; Sidanius 1985; Tetlock 1983, 1984; Tetlock, Bernzweig, & Gallant, 1985). Furthermore, conservatives tend to possess stronger personal needs for order, structure, closure, and decisiveness in comparison with liberals (e.g., Jost et al., 2003; Kruglanski, 2005; Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004). An important longitudinal study by Block and Block (in press) revealed that many of the personality differences between liberals and conservatives that appear in adulthood are already present when children are in nursery school, long before they define themselves in terms of political orientation. Specifically, preschool children who later identified themselves as liberal were perceived by their teachers as: self-reliant, energetic, emotionally expressive, gregarious, and impulsive. By contrast, those children Liberals and conservatives 8 who later identified as conservative were seen as: rigid, inhibited, indecisive, fearful, and over-controlled. These findings—especially in conjunction with adult data (see Jost et al., 2003 for a summary) and growing evidence that there is a heritable component of political attitudes (Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005)—appear to substantiate the convictions of Adorno et al., Tomkins, Wilson, and many others that basic personality dimensions underlie ideological differences between the left and right. The problem is that previous research in this area has been far from systematic, coordinated, or cumulative. Each investigator (or team of investigators) has merely added a new distinction or way of characterizing liberals and conservatives without attempting to develop a common or shared framework for interpreting and integrating the mass of theories and findings. An Integrative Taxonomy and Overview of the Current Research In an effort to distill a core set of personality characteristics that have been theorized to distinguish between political liberals and conservatives, we have listed in Table 1 the traits that have figured most prominently in relevant psychological theories since 1930. To help organize the resulting list into thematic categories that could be used to guide our research program, we drew heavily upon conceptual and empirical contributions of the Five-Factor Model (FFM) of personality, which provides a useful organizing framework for classifying and measuring distinct, relatively non-overlapping personality dimensions (e.g., Goldberg, 1992; John & Srivastava, 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1999; Wiggins, 1996). Because of the unprecedented scope, comprehensiveness, and empirical backing of the FFM, we found it to be uniquely helpful as a means of cataloguing and assessing the validity of the enormous number of trait descriptions of liberals and conservatives that psychologists have generated over the last seventy-five years (see also Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004). Thus, for each of the descriptive traits (or clusters of traits) listed in Table 1, we have sought to identify which of the five basic personality dimensions best capture the essence of the description. The result is a remarkable consensus over more than seven decades (and across numerous cultures and languages) that the two personality dimensions that should be most related to political orientation are Openness to Experience—consistently theorized to be higher among liberals—and Conscientiousness—sometimes theorized to be higher among conservatives. Liberals and conservatives 9 Traits associated with the other three dimensions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) have occasionally been linked to political orientation in previous theorizing (see Table 1), but their mention has been far less frequent and consistent. Although direct attempts to understand personality differences between liberals and conservatives in terms of “Big Five” dimensions have been rare (e.g., see Caprara, Barbaranelli & Zimbardo, 1999), several FFM studies have included measures of political orientation. The largely serendipitous results derived from these studies are generally consistent with expectations gleaned from Table 1. By far the most consistent finding is that liberals tend to score higher than conservatives on self-report measures of Openness to Experience (e.g., Barnea & Schwartz, 1998; Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann, 2003; Jost et al., 2003; McCrae, 1996; Riemann, Grubich, Hempel, Mergl, & Richter, 1993; Trapnell, 1994; Van Hiel & Mervielde, 2004). There is also some evidence that conservatives tend to score slightly higher than liberals on Conscientiousness (Caprara et al., 1999; Gosling et al., 2003; Mehrabian, 1996; Van Hiel, Mervielde, & De Fruyt, 2004). Stenner (2005) argued that, “Conscientiousness, which is primarily associated with rigidity, orderliness, and a compulsion about being in control of one’s environment . . . promotes conservatism to a considerable degree” (p. 172). There is no consistent evidence in the research literature that Neuroticism, Extraversion, or Agreeableness are reliably correlated with political orientation, although some theorists have proposed differences between liberals and conservatives on traits related to these dimensions (see Table 1). In our first study we sought to determine definitively whether the two dimensions of Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness would adequately capture personality trait differences between liberals and conservatives, at least in the context of the United States. We therefore examined correlations between scores on “Big Five” dimensions and liberalism-conservatism in 6 different samples. At the same time, we wanted to be sure that any personality differences were “genuine” and not merely the result of divergent self-presentational strategies adopted by liberals and conservatives. This was especially important given that many of the theories we have reviewed predict differences that would emerge only in private, nonreactive settings (e.g., cleanliness, expressiveness, and organization) or in the context of Liberals and conservatives 10 interpersonal interaction (e.g., stubbornness, enthusiasm, and withdrawal). Therefore, we went well beyond traditional self-report methods of personality assessment to explore more subtle, unobtrusive differences (e.g., Webb et al., 1981) with respect to everyday preferences concerning issues, groups, and personal activities (Study 2), nonverbal behavior and social interaction styles (Study 3), and identity claims and behavioral residue in living and working spaces (Study 4). Taken as a whole, these studies provide the most sustained and comprehensive investigation of personality differences underlying political orientation to date. Study 1: Personality Differences between Liberals and Conservatives The goal of Study 1 was to obtain general personality profiles of liberals and conservatives to assess the accuracy of the theoretical speculations adumbrated in Table 1. It was hypothesized that, based on prior theory and research, liberals would score higher than conservatives on Openness to Experience, whereas conservatives would score higher than liberals on Conscientiousness. No consistent differences between liberals and conservatives on the three other Big Five dimensions (Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were expected. Personality profiles were gathered in 5 different American samples (total N = 19,248) by using individuals’ scores on each of the Big Five personality dimensions to predict their political orientation. In this and in subsequent studies, political orientation was assessed using single self-report items, as is customary in the political science literature (e.g., Knight, 1999). Although very short measures can be subject to psychometric limitations, in many cases they are effective for assessing constructs that are well understood by laypeople (e.g., Burisch, 1997; Gosling et al., 2003). The single item measure of liberalism-conservatism demonstrates good test-retest reliability and predictive validity (e.g., see Jost, 2006; Knight, 1999). Method and Procedure Samples 1-4. Four samples (Ns = 85, 79, 155, and 1826) were recruited from the University of Texas at Austin. Sixty-four percent of the participants (across samples) were female. Racial/ethnic group identification was as follows: 60% European American, 23% Asian American, and 12% Latino; the remaining 5% were of other ethnicities. Sample 1 completed the NEO-PI-R (Costa & McCrae, 1985), Liberals and conservatives 11 which contains 240 items that are answered on a scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Samples 2-4 completed the 44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991). Reliability was acceptable for all five factors and all four samples: Openness (α = .90 for Sample 1, .77 for Sample 2, .76 for Sample 3, and .79 for Sample 4), Conscientiousness (α = .92, .76, .78, .77), Extraversion (α = .90, .89, .86, .87), Agreeableness (α = .89, .79, .82, .77), and Neuroticism (α = .92, .85, .79, .77). Participants indicated their political orientation on a scale ranging from 1 (liberal) to 9 (conservative) for Sample 1 (M = 5.02, SD = 2.30) and for Sample 4 (M = 4.95, SD = 2.23). For Sample 2, the scale ranged from 1 (liberal) to 7 (conservative), M = 4.29, SD = 1.88, and for Sample 3 it ranged from 1 (liberal) to 5 (conservative), M = 3.17, SD = 1.15. Sample 5. Participants in Sample 5 were similar in terms of age and educational experience, but they constituted a larger and far more representative group. They were part of the Gosling-Potter Internet Personality Project and were recruited with the use of a non-commercial, advertisement-free website through one of several channels: (1) major search engines (in response to keywords such as "personality tests"), (2) portal sites, such as Yahoo! (under directories of personality tests), (3) voluntary mailing lists that participants had previously joined, and (4) “word-of-mouth” from other visitors. We analyzed data from 17, 103 American, college-attending participants between the ages of 18-25 years old who visited the website between March 2001 and May 2004. In terms of demographic characteristics, 68% of the sample was female, 72% identified themselves as European American, 8% as Asian American, 7% as African American, 7% as Latino, and 1% as Native American; the remaining 5% declined to prove racial/ethnic information about themselves. Upon arrival at the website, participants opted to take a personality test. They completed the same 44-item BFI used in Samples 2-4. Scale means, standard deviations, reliabilities, and intercorrelations were consistent with those typically obtained in laboratory studies (e.g., John et al., 1991). Participants were also asked “how politically conservative-liberal are you?” They responded using a scale ranging from 1 (extremely liberal) to 5 (extremely conservative), M = 2.94, SD = 1.40.