A fascinating article in last week’s Economist reported on a study by researchers at Binghamton University. They gave volunteers beepers to two groups thought to represent “conservative” and “liberal” camps, and every two hours asked the volunteers what they were doing and how they felt about it. (Unfortunately, like many university studies, they relied on a group that may not be reflective of the whole population — namely, teenagers. But I suppose you have to work with what you have available….)
They found interesting differences between conservative and liberal groups:
Liberal teenagers always felt more stress than conservatives, but were particularly stressed if they could not decide for themselves whom they spent time with. Such choice, or the lack of it, did not change conservative stress levels. Liberals were also loners, spending a quarter of their time on their own. Conservatives were alone for a sixth of the time. That may have been related to the fact that liberals were equally bored by their own company and that of others. Conservatives were far less bored when with other people. They also preferred the company of relatives to non-relatives. Liberals were indifferent. Perhaps most intriguingly, the more religious a liberal teenager claimed to be, the more he was willing to confront his parents with dissenting beliefs. The opposite was true for conservatives.
The researchers concluded that liberalism and conservatism may be responses to stable or unstable environments:
Dr Wilson suspects that the liberal package of individualism and confrontation is the appropriate response to survival in a stable environment in which there is leisure for learning and reflection, and the consequences for a group’s stability of such dissent are low. The conservative package of collectivism and conformity, by contrast, works in an unstable environment where joint action, and thus obedience to their group, are at a premium. It is an interesting suggestion, and it is one that plays into the question of how morality actually evolved.
This rings somewhat true for me, although I suspect most Americans (correctly or not) tend to identify “individualism” with conservatives and “collectivism” with liberals. I also suspect that a more potent determinant of liberal or conservative leanings has to do with innate personality traits. Viewing liberalism or conservatism as an adaptive trait probably works better on the level of societies than on the level o individuals: Wealthy, stable societies tend to be more liberal; poorer, less-stable societies tend to be more conservative.
I suspect that more and more research will show that political leanings are less attributable to rational “policy” considerations than traditionally thought to be the case.
Tags: conservatism, liberalism