Any discussion of “conservatives” and “liberals” is going to reduce both down to caricatures, so let’s just state, for the record, that not all conservatives write “Christ follower” in their Twitter bios and not all liberals hate God and love composting. Social conservatives, Schwarz says, tend to think the world is the way it ought to be. They’re more resistant to cultural change, such as the transgender-rights movement. Liberals, meanwhile, are often evaluating why things just don’t seem right, why the lives of some people aren’t as good as those of others. “Once you start questioning things, a lot of stuff is up for consideration,” Schwarz says. The world tends to be less meaningful to people who think tradition is unimportant and everything can—and possibly should—change on a dime.
“If you’re a person who has a clear sense of where they belong in society, and you’re a person who essentially looks to the past to established ways of living, it seems like a very short step to perceiving life as more ordered and meaningful,” said Colin Holbrook, a professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California at Merced.
Others agreed that this, shall we call it, “the way things ought to be” hypothesis has some merit.
“Conservatives are more likely to have the sense that there’s an order in their life, and a commitment to order gives people a sense of meaning as well,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “To flip it, conservatives might be missing some nuances. For liberals, the capacity to see the gray in life might be valuable in some sense, but also not give them as clear a sense of meaning.”
Conservatives also tend to be more “self-enhancing” than liberals are, says Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California at Irvine. They tend to talk up how great their lives are and downplay their struggles. But it’s liberals who actually act happier, even if they say they aren’t, Ditto says. He found in a study that people affiliated with Democratic causes are more likely to show a genuine “Duchenne” smile—a “smile with your eyes,” as Tyra would say—and to use positive words in their speech.
Then again, Ditto speculated, “the bar for meaning-in-life might just be lower for conservatives.” Ouch.
And that’s the central problem in studies like these: People start to see them through the lens of their own political views....
But the labels “liberal” and “conservative” don’t actually mean that much right at this current moment....
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Originally Posted by mamooth
