I once wrote a diary that asked about peoples' High-School Experience and whether they felt it affected the formation of their political ideology. Does a persons experience of being the nerd picked last to play football or being the head cheerleader & popular affect a person's outlook on life & the ideology they adopt as an adult? Are there certain types of people who seem to always end up as cons & libs? Why does someone choose left over right or vice versa? What is the psychological foundation of it?
There is an old saying that "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged." According to recent psychological research, that might not be too far from the truth. The findings seem to indicate that Death & Fear Of Death = Conservatism....
Among the childhood differences obsevered between liberals & conservatives....
In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
Among the other differences observed between liberals & conservatives in psychological studies....
- The more educated someone becomes, the more liberal they tend to be. However, once people progress toward certain types of graduate school (such as business school) this tends to be less true.
- Liberals tend to have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics.
- Liberals tend to be more optimistic.
- Conservatives are more likely to be religious.
- Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, where conservatives tend to like country music.
- Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art.
- Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio.
- Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.
- Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional.
The last one is interesting when it comes to explaining the effect of 9/11 & the political effect it had in the years after. In the weeks after 9/11, Bush had a 90% approval rating that didn't come back down to the 50% level for 2 years. Why?
The most comprehensive review of personality and political orientation to date is a 2003 meta-analysis of 88 prior studies involving 22,000 participants. The researchers—John Jost of NYU, Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland, and Jack Glaser and Frank Sulloway of Berkeley—found that conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
In this respect, liberals look at the world in greys where conservatives see black & white....
The reason thoughts of death make people more conservative, Jost says, is that they awaken a deep desire to see the world as fair and just, to believe that people get what they deserve, and to accept the existing social order as valid, rather than in need of change. When these natural desires are primed by thoughts of death and a barrage of mortal fear, people gravitate toward conservatism because it's more certain about the answers it provides—right vs. wrong, good vs. evil, us vs. them—and because conservative leaders are more likely to advocate a return to traditional values, allowing people to stick with what's familiar and known. "Conservatism is a more black and white ideology than liberalism," explains Jost. "It emphasizes tradition and authority, which are reassuring during periods of threat."
To test the theory, Jost prompted people to think about either pain—by looking at things like an ambulance, a dentist's chair, and a bee sting—or death, by looking at things like a funeral hearse, the grim reaper, and a dead-end sign. Across the political spectrum, people who had been primed to think about death were more conservative on issues like immigration, affirmative action, and same-sex marriage than those who had merely thought about pain, although the effect size was relatively small. The implication is clear: For liberals, conservatives, and independents alike, thinking about death actually makes people more conservative—at least temporarily.
I've always wondered about how many members of Daily Kos were part of that 90% that approved in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center towers? I'm guessing it was most likely Iraq for most people, but I would love to know what was the straw that broke the camel's back?