-
sponsorship
When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards.
In an unpublished paper titled "The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives," Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, and three other colleagues* looked for the underlying personality traits that defined left and right. Gosling is the author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. He's a specialist in analyzing what the things people have around them say about their personalities and beliefs. When it comes to politics, your stuff does define you.
Gosling's theory is that "ideological differences between left and right are partially rooted in basic personality dispositions." In particular, Gosling and his co-authors hypothesized that liberals and conservatives differed in two major "personality dimensions." Liberals are more likely to be open to experiences. Conservatives would score higher on measures of conscientiousness. Liberals would be more motivated by curiosity, creativity, and diversity of experiences. Conservatives would value following the rules, self-control, and order.
The psychologists conducted three tests, and they all produced evidence that liberals did show more openness to experience and conservatives did tend to be attracted to normality. The social scientists took polls and observed subjects in these tests, but the snooping came when investigators looked for physical clues in dorm rooms and offices.
Conservatives' bedrooms tended to have more calendars and postage stamps. They had more flags and sports posters. Conservatives' bedrooms were neater and better lit—they had more laundry baskets, ironing boards, cleaning supplies, and sewing thread.
Liberals' bedrooms had a greater variety of books (especially books about travel, feminism, and music). They had more CDs and a greater variety of music (folk, world, classical). Liberal bedrooms had more art supplies, cultural memorabilia, and maps of other countries.
These same traits carried over to the work life. Conservatives' offices "tended to be more conventional, less stylish, and less comfortable compared with liberal offices." Liberals' offices were more colorful and contained more CDs and "a greater variety of books."
In summarizing their findings, the four authors concluded, "Liberals did appear to be more open, tolerant, creative, curious, expressive, enthusiastic, and drawn to novelty and diversity, in comparison with conservatives, who appeared to be more conventional, orderly, organized, neat, clean, withdrawn, reserved, rigid, and relatively intolerant." Ideological differences were indeed more than skin deep.
And these personality differences varied geographically across the nation. In an earlier paper, Gosling found that those open to experience were more likely to live in California, Washington, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, and Colorado.
Conscientious states included Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.
Notice a pattern? Like that all but two of the "openness" states in 2004 voted for John Kerry and all but one of the conscientious states sided with George Bush?
Statistician Bob Cushing found these same differences at the metropolitan level using an entirely different set of data. In a study of how people were sorting by city, Cushing compared personality traits in high-tech cities and low-tech cities. High-tech cities were determined by their tech output and patents per capita. There were 21 cities that placed above the national average in both categories, metro areas such as Boise, Austin, Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, Los Angeles, Boston, and Portland.
People living in high-tech cities were more interested in other places and cultures. They were more likely to "try anything once." They were more likely to be optimistic and to engage in individualistic activities. High-tech cities grew increasingly Democratic in presidential elections from 1980 to 2004 as they collected more people who described themselves as "liberal." (See our book, The Big Sort, for details.)
The 130 cities with the lowest levels of tech output and patent production grew increasingly Republican. Cushing found that people living in these places were more supportive of traditional authority, more family-oriented, more likely to engage in social activities with other people and more likely to attend church. People who described themselves as conservative were more likely to move there.
The differences—political, ideological, and cultural—were growing between low-tech and high-tech metros.
The election next week may well be a landslide. That doesn't mean the basic divisions in the country have gone away. "Political orientation appears to pervade almost every aspect of our public and private lives, possibly now more than in recent decades," Gosling and his co-authors write. "Not only does it describe how we think about and what we value in terms of government and society as a whole, but it also appears to leave its mark on how we behave toward others, travel, decorate our walls, clean our bodies and our homes, and on how we choose to spend our free time."
The Republican Party is likely to end next Tuesday in a shambles. That's when the countdown begins for the time when these basic American differences will re-emerge in our politics.
*"The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind" was co-authored by Gosling, Dana R. Carney at Columbia University, John T. Jost of New York University, and Jeff Potter of Atof Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.
-
sponsorship
"Jennifer" called into the NPR show "Talk of the Nation" last Thursday to describe a wonderful democratic experiment she and her husband were conducting at the business they own in North Carolina.
Their firm has about 100 workers, and she and her husband believe that "it's important for all of our employees to really be engaged and aware citizens." So Jennifer holds what she calls "lunch ‘n' learns" throughout the year. Sometimes employees will lead discussions on issues over the noon hour. (Workers prepare presentations on, say, health care and then talk about the issue from several sides.) During elections, employees may bring in candidates, who are allowed to talk to employees who come to the sessions. No one is required to attend, but Jennifer said her workers like coming to the events.
"We find that when we have things fostered in a really disciplined but civil way, we get people feeling much better about talking about it," Jennifer said. "It doesn't become as heated, but people become educated and engaged."
Wonderful, right? Well, there was an employment attorney on the show who warned Jennifer to watch out. "If Jennifer was my client," said New Jersey lawyer Stacey Adams, "I would probably strongly advise her against doing what she's doing."
Huh?
There are a "lot of potential problems, even if it's done during nonwork activities such as lunchtime," Adams continued. "I think that if one candidate endorses particular views which are deemed offensive to ... other employees, that could present a problem."
Welcome to America, where a lunchtime discussion of ideas among citizens who might have differing opinions "could present a problem."
Unfortunately, if people don't talk about politics at work, there are very few places left where they might have a face-to-face discussion with those who have a different opinion. Churches are now among the most politically segregated institutions in America. Neighborhoods have tipped either Republican or Democratic, and they have kept tipping as like-minded people have clustered. Even volunteer groups have grown more homogeneous.
Americans love to talk about politics. They just don't find many times when they talk about politics with those who have different political outlooks. (See Diana Mutz's fantastic book Hearing the Other Side for the details on our country's love of political conformity.) Educated people are particularly skilled at avoiding contrary opinions, according to Mutz, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She writes that Americans with less than a high-school diploma have the greatest diversity in political discussion mates. Those with the most narrow political lives are Americans who have suffered through graduate school.
Democracy is greased with tolerance and understanding, and those virtues are more abundant when people who disagree find themselves meeting regularly face-to-face. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1848, "It's hardly possible to overstate the value ... of placing human beings in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar." It's hardly possible to overstate the rarity with which this kind of exchange happens in America.
There is one place in the social landscape where we are pushed into settings with a mixed political crowd. That's at work. "Of all the contexts with the potential for political interaction, the workplace currently has the greatest capacity for exposing people to political dialogue across lines of political difference," write Mutz and Jeffrey Mondak.
The workplace is one of the few settings where people of different political beliefs have to deal with each other, so workplaces are one of the last places where Americans are placed "in contact with other persons dissimilar to themselves." In North Carolina, Jennifer's lunch sessions are the kind of hard, day-to-day work of democratic life that most of us avoid.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?