Can You Guess a Person's Politics by Their Personality? Psychologist Team Says Yes
By Maria Luisa Tucker, AlterNet. Posted October 29, 2008.

http://www.alternet.org/election08/105089/?page=entire

A map illustrating regional personality differences across America is surprisingly similar to the red state/blue state map of the nation.

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.

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 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.

--Reverse those and look at the GOP. Rote repetition of unworkable ideas, lack of intellectual curiosity, (I read ALL the newspapers and magazines, you betcha!), anti-intellectualism, (smart means elite), and demonizing of anyone who dares dissent, not to mention torture.

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.

--Tight-assed Puritanical prudes, yes.

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.

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.



People who described themselves as political conservatives occupied rooms that were cleaner, more organized and more brightly lit, displaying the Republican trait of

--orderliness and conformity.

The right-wingers were also found to have more cleaning supplies, calendars, postage stamps and laundry products.

--Fear of contamination.

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.

--Stronger and more lively internal/ mental lives and not sweating the small stuff.

Involuntary reactions to being startled and political reactions to things that may disrupt social order are both related to a part of brain called the amygdala. Therefore, conservatives who react most vividly to threats -- whether it's a threat to social order or a national security threat -- should, theoretically, also sweat the most when presented with an image of a scary spider.

The results of that study did, in fact, reveal that "individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War." In other words, the folks who most supported the war in Iraq, for example, sweated more when presented with an image of a scary spider.

Fear, in fact, has been shown to be one of the most powerful predictors of support for conservative leaders.

--Sieg Heil, indeed. Fear mongers and bullies.

According to a 2006 Pew Research Center opinion survey, 46 percent of conservative Republicans reported that they were "very happy" while only 28 percent of liberal Democrats could say the same. This was not a one-time fluke of polling. In an analysis of data from the United States and nine other countries, Jost and a colleague found that right-wingers consistently said they were happier than their left-wing counterparts.

--Smug, self-satisfied ideologues who don't care about others suffering. Insensitive louts. "Go fuck yourself" Dicks Like Cheney, in short.

The first reason for all the unhappiness on the left: Liberals think too much. "To the extent that liberals tend to enjoy thinking more and to prolong cognitive closure, whereas conservatives tend to prefer relatively simple, unambiguous answers to life's questions ... liberals might become less satisfied with their current situation because of the deleterious effects of rumination and introspection," the authors of the study wrote.

--Meaning right wingers prefer answers to questions, rules to guidelines, etc. Goose-stepping Nazis.

Second: Right-wingers don't let the inequality in the world get to them. "Our research suggests that inequality takes a greater psychological toll on liberals than on conservatives, apparently because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."

--Right winger response to suffering, inequality, and other horrors is a Dicks Like Cheney, "So?" Meanwhile, the rest of us don't have the unquestioned obedience to dogma that would allow us not to worry so much.

Because conservative politics promote the status quo, it allows conservatives to view the status quo economic inequality as acceptable, they said.

--I drink your milkshake.

To back up this argument, researchers pointed to historical data that showed how liberals and conservatives reacted differently between the growing gap between rich and poor. As income inequality grew significantly in the United States from 1974 to 2004, the numbers of conservatives who said they were happy decreased mildly. Meanwhile, the number of happy liberals plunged.

--Because the GOP types do not care about people. They are callous, cruel sociopaths. Liberals want everyone to be healthy, happy, and okay.

--In sum, to use the kind of ruducio ad absurdum logic-to-extremes that the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, and O'Reilly would gleefully employ: Right wingers are not humane, and are barely human. Corporatism, right wing ideology, and conservatism is an illness, an aberration from the rest of humanity, a personality disorder due to a childhood of fear, separation, and insecurity.

--So what's the cure? Seems to me All They Need Is Love, the poor fearful vicious little things.