October 13, 2008 in Mind & Brain
Political Science: What Being Neat or Messy Says about Political Leanings
Do genes determine whether you’ll be liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican?
By Jordan Lite
Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.
According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags—especially American ones.
“This is different from putting up an Obama–Biden sticker on your bulletin board,“ says Sam Gosling, who co-authored the study that included surveys and room inspections of 76 college students and 94 professionals ranging fromrealtors to architects.
These room cues are “behavioral residue,“ says Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. The idea is that distinct cognitive inclinations of liberals towards ambiguity and intellectualism, and conservatives toward order, “drive the way one leads one’s life and displays one’s life in their living and work spaces,“ says Gosling’s co-author Dana Carney, an assistant professor of management at Columbia University’s Business School in New York City.
Those cognitive styles turn up in a personality test called the Big Five, which assesses people for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism; only the first two have been strongly linked to political tendencies, says New York University (N.Y.U.) social psychologist John Jost, another author on the study.
“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,“ says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.“
The findings are just the latest in a burst of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and even genetic tests are turning up possible clues to our political origins and behaviors.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school–age kids—and correlate with those children’s political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person’s startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Researchers insist they can tell someone’s politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You’re a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.
So does being ambivalent mean that Im in center field picking daisies by myself, singing showtunes??
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“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,“ says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school–age kids—and correlate with those children’s political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person’s startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Notice they didn’t find anything to say about the positive personality traits of conservatives or the negative personality traits of liberals…
I really dislike it when an article goes out of its way to paint conservatives in a negative light….
Seriously. I’m neat at work, in the kitchen, and with my school things, but messy with my clothes and books; but I can clean up with the best of them, and would never not have cleaning supplies around. What am I, then, according to this? This sort of thing is just BS.
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“It’s pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete,“ says Carney. “Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one’s environment is predictable and therefore safe.
Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school–age kids—and correlate with those children’s political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person’s startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.
Notice they didn’t find anything to say about the positive personality traits of conservatives or the negative personality traits of liberals…
I really dislike it when an article goes out of its way to paint conservatives in a negative light….
I wholly agree. I’m extremely lefty, and I’m all for bashing conservatives when I’m having a beer with my liberal friends, but in an article presenting a scientific study, it’s wholly inappropriate.
Also: there’s really a publication called the Journal of Political Psychology???
So does being ambivalent mean that Im in center field picking daisies by myself, singing showtunes??
Yes. Do you take song requests?
NEO - 15 October 2008 09:33 AM
I think studies like this are bull. They have a hypotheses, then find data to support it.
That seems to be something of a standard methodology in psychology, from what I’ve seen.
“We’ll use rats to test our new behaviour hypothesis. Hmmmm, seventy out of the one hundred rats didn’t do what we thought that they’d do. Let’s call those rats mentally aberrant and unsuitable for experimentation, and accept only the thirty that performed as we had predicted.“
zgloria - 15 October 2008 11:57 AM
Also: there’s really a publication called the Journal of Political Psychology???
Seems to be. You need to subscribe to see most articles, though.
And the authors seem to be real people: here’s Carney’s university page, and if you look under her list of collaborators you’ll see Samuel D. Gosling. And if you look under “Research”, it looks like she might very well be the sort of person to try a study like this one. I am somewhat hoping it might be one of those joke articles. . .
Seriously. I’m neat at work, in the kitchen, and with my school things, but messy with my clothes and books; but I can clean up with the best of them, and would never not have cleaning supplies around.
Seriously. I’m neat at work, in the kitchen, and with my school things, but messy with my clothes and books; but I can clean up with the best of them, and would never not have cleaning supplies around.
Me too.
Maybe that means you all would fall into some weird group like the Green Party or the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Libertarians. If you were in the US.
According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.
Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags*—especially American ones.
Ok, I do/have the things highlighted…
* - Ok, at least two are pirate flags.
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t say I was surrounded by laundry baskets…
