Recently I have stumbled upon several studies that seem to suggest that (at least in the US) #conservatives are happier and healthier than #liberals, that they are more tolerant of different points of view, and that they understand the ideas of their adversaries better than they are understood.
👇 Putting it all here, plus some comments where I think results may be biased or distorted.
① #Marriage and family life:
“Conservatives are more likely than liberals to be happily married, simply because they’re more likely to be married in the first place. […] Ideology predicts marital status among Americans about as well as income or education.”
— https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-than-money-the-liberal-conservative-divide-in-marriage/
Possible flaw: I suspect age correlates with both probability of being married and with probability of leaning right, so when you look at who’s married today, some of those (happily) married who declare to be conservatives would have been singles who identified as liberals two or three decades earlier. In other words: perhaps it’s not that being a liberal makes you less likely to marry, but that being married and having children moves you closer to conservatism!
③ #Happiness (and mental health again):
“Political conservatives are happier than liberals. We proposed that this happiness gap is accounted for by specific attitude and personality differences associated with positive adjustment and mental health. […] In four studies, […] differences accounted for the happiness gap. These patterns are consistent with the positive adjustment explanation.”
— https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S009265661100170X
Possible flaw: “conservatives, who are described as fearful, defensive, and low in self-esteem, will rationalize away social inequalities in order to justify the status quo (system justification)” (same source).
④ #Tolerance:
“Liberals are in their personal lives more intolerant of conservatives than vice versa across numerous dimensions in the US and the UK. Those on the left are more likely to block someone on social media over their views, be upset if their child marries someone from the other side, and find it hard to be friends with or date someone they disagree with politically.”
— https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-is-everything-liberal
Sources here, with lots of interesting surveys and charts: https://noahcarl.medium.com/who-doesnt-want-to-hear-the-other-side-s-view-9a7cdf3ad702
⑤ Mutual understanding:
“We tested how well liberals and conservatives could understand each other. We asked more than two thousand American visitors to fill out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. […] One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as they think a ‘typical liberal’ would respond. One-third of the time they were asked to fill it out as a ‘typical conservative’ would respond. […] The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were the least accurate, especially those who described themselves as ‘very liberal’.”
One may be tempted to brush aside any positive correlation between conservatism and health and happiness as a side-effect of some strong positive correlation between conservatism and income/wealth (“well, no wonder conservatives are happier and healthier and start more families: they just have more money!”).
Except… there is no such strong correlation. Today, in countries like the US and Spain, income “has for all practical purposes zero discernible effect” in voting attitudes, or the effect is very weak.
So there has to be something else going on.
WDYT?
@tripu Wait, diagnosed means seeking help. Is there a number correcting for that?
② Mental #health:
— https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1248823825317363714
Possible flaw: “it’s possible that the disparities in self-reported diagnosis are simply or partly a function of white liberals being more likely to seek mental health evaluations”.