Conservatives are happier than liberals, a new study has confirmed.
Researchers at the University of Chicago have found that people with conservative views are more likely to experience happiness and fulfillment.
Conservatives tend to have a higher belief in the fairness of society, which is an important basis for lifelong happiness.
In their newspaper, published in the Journal of PersonalityProfessor Shigehiro Oishi and his co-authors write: ‘Across six studies, we largely replicate previous findings that happiness was associated with slightly more political conservatism.’
Liberals, on the other hand, lead psychologically richer lives, characterized by diverse and stimulating experiences.
According to the study, this could be because people with liberal views tend to be more open to new experiences.
The researchers caution that these strong correlations do not necessarily mean that psychological factors cause political views, or vice versa.
“Our work just illustrates that a good life should not be narrowly understood as just a happy life or a meaningful life,” she added.
Scientists say conservatives are likely to be happier in their lives and experience a greater sense of fulfillment and meaning. In the photo: Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
Previous research on the links between psychology and political views has largely focused on happiness and meaning.
These two psychological measures measure how satisfied a person is with his or her life and how much purpose or fulfillment he or she experiences.
However, in this study, Professor Oishi and his colleagues also examined the less-researched measure of ‘psychological wealth’.
The researchers write: ‘A psychologically rich life is defined as one filled with diverse, interesting experiences that result in changes in perspective.’
This differs from happiness and meaning because it emphasizes diversity and complexity over satisfaction or purpose in life.
The link between psychological wealth and political preference was tested in six different studies, each using slightly different sample groups, measures, and procedures.
These groups included four groups of college students in the US, 1,217 American adults and 2,176 adults in South Korea.
However, despite these diverse samples, the results were extremely consistent across groups.
A new study has found that people with liberal views, like Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris (pictured), are at greater risk of living a psychologically rich life marked by diverse and challenging experiences.
In general, the higher someone scores on conservative views, the higher the score on happiness and meaning.
However, these six studies also found that conservatives tended to score worse on psychological wealth.
This third aspect of well-being was more associated with liberal views, meaning that the less conservative someone was, the more likely they were to live a rich and diverse psychological life.
In their paper, Professor Oishi and his colleagues suggest that these trends can be explained by a few psychological factors.
Previous research has shown that conservatives have a stronger sense that the current status quo and the broader social order are fair, a trait called “system justification.”
The researchers write: ‘Happiness was also associated with system justification, or the tendency to view current political, economic and social systems as fair and defensible.’
Similarly, higher levels of meaning can be explained with reference to what the researchers describe as a ‘Protestant work ethic’.
This is the belief, more common among conservatives, that hard work will inevitably lead to just reward and success in life.
The researchers say liberalism is generally associated with a greater sense of openness. This leads to a greater chance of psychological wealth, but does not necessarily make people happy. Pictured is Prime Minister and leader of the Labor Party Keir Starmer
The researchers noted that when people had a stronger Protestant work ethic, they also had a stronger belief that their lives had purpose, value, or meaning.
As for psychological wealth, the researchers suggest that it may be related to the personality trait of openness.
Openness is one of the ‘big five’ personality traits associated with imaginative thinking, creativity, adaptability and the ability to accept new information.
The researchers write: ‘While extraversion and neuroticism are the strongest Big Five predictors of happiness, life satisfaction and meaning in life, openness to experience is the strongest predictor of a psychologically rich life.’
Research has found that openness to experience tends to be lower among conservatives, which could explain the trend toward lower psychological wealth and greater happiness.
However, Professor Oishi and his colleagues emphasize that their findings should be taken with a grain of salt.
First, although conservatism was almost always associated with greater happiness, the Korean samples did not show the same correlation between political beliefs and psychological wealth.
Conservatives, such as Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch (pictured), have a greater belief in the fairness of the status quo and in the idea that hard work will lead to reward. This usually lays the foundation for greater happiness and a sense of meaning
This suggests that the relationships may vary depending on cultural context.
Furthermore, the researchers write: ‘We caution that our interpretation of the current findings is necessarily correlational, and not causal.’
This means that conservatism does not necessarily make people happy, nor has it been proven that being liberal causes someone to experience psychological wealth.
Instead, it could be that there is some other factor, such as socio-economic background, that jointly causes both characteristics.
The researchers conclude that the main importance of their findings is to show that happiness and meaning are not the only ways to think about happiness.
The authors conclude: ‘We are not claiming that a psychologically rich life is in any way better than a happy life or a meaningful life.
‘By broadening our understanding of what constitutes the ‘good’ in a good life, the concept of psychological wealth opens up new conceptual space within the science of well-being.’