Your Personality and Your Vote

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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.