Your Personality and Your Vote

Ronald Bailey | November 3, 2008

ScienceDaily is running a press release featuring the insights of New Hampshire University psychologist John Mayer who details the personality traits that incline voters in either liberal or conservative directions:

Liberals:

• View social inequities and preferred groups as unjust and requiring reform.
• Prefer atheists, tattoos, foreign films and poetry.
• Endorse gay unions, welfare, universal health care, feminism and environmentalism.
• Exhibit creativity, which entails the capacity to see solutions to problems, and empathy toward others.
• Tolerate complexity and ambiguity.
• Are influenced by their work as judges, social workers, professors and other careers for which an appreciation of opposing points of view is required.

Conservatives:

• Willing to defend current social inequities and preferred groups as justifiable or necessary.
• Prefer prayer, religious people and SUVs.
• Endorse the U.S. government, the military, the state they live in, big corporations and most Americans.
• Are more likely to be a first-born, who identify more with their parents, predisposing them to a greater investment in authority and a preference for conservatism.
• Have a fear of death, reflecting an enhanced need for security.
• Are conscientious – the ability to exert personal self-control to the effect of meeting one’s own and others’ demands, and maintaining personal coherence.
• Need simplicity, clarity and certainty.

So are you an empathetic and creative Obama voter or a fearful and simplicity-craving McCain supporter? Or do some psychologists have a certain unacknowledged preference for simplicity and clarity when it comes to politics? 

Some of my other reporting on pathologizing conversatives here.