The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives: Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the Things They Leave Behind

TLDR

Evidence suggests that meaningful left‑right differences exist and may be rooted in stable personality dispositions, a conclusion supported by 75 years of personality and political orientation research. The study investigates how personality relates to political orientation across three studies using self‑report, nonverbal behavior, and environmental cues. The authors employed self‑report personality measures, coded nonverbal behavior during social interaction, and examined personal possessions and environmental characteristics to assess personality‑politics links. Openness and Conscientiousness explain much of the variation in political orientation, with liberals scoring higher on openness and novelty seeking and conservatives higher on conscientiousness, order, and conventionality, and these differences are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially for social dimensions of ideology.

Abstract

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are “ideological,” evidence suggests that meaningful left‐right differences do exist and that they may be rooted in basic personality dispositions, that is, relatively stable individual differences in psychological needs, motives, and orientations toward the world. Seventy‐five years of theory and research on personality and political orientation has produced a long list of dispositions, traits, and behaviors. Applying a theory of ideology as motivated social cognition and a “Big Five” framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Conscientiousness, parsimoniously capture many of the ways in which individual differences underlying political orientation have been conceptualized. In three studies we investigate the relationship between personality and political orientation using multiple domains and measurement techniques, including: self‐reported personality assessment; nonverbal behavior in the context of social interaction; and personal possessions and the characteristics of living and working spaces. We obtained consistent and converging evidence that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are robust, replicable, and behaviorally significant, especially with respect to social (vs. economic) dimensions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open‐minded, creative, curious, and novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better organized.