26 September, 2024

Are conservatives happier?

As the aricle below rightly notes, there is a long history of survey findings which show conservatives to be happier than Leftists. It would be surprising otherwise. Leftistm is almost by definition dissatisfaction with the world about the Leftist so that should show up in characteristic mood. Leftists are the miserable people politically so one might expect that description to be generally true

And the article below does deliver that expected conclusion.

I am going to be a spoilsport, however, and say that while I do agree with their concluson and am myself a happy conservative, their findings in fact show something quite different from what they claim.

The big problem with their research is that it used as data that old standby of lazy psychologists: The responses of college students. Such subjects can be very different from what you find among general population studies. During my long career as a survey researcher, I used almost entirely general population samples and what I found might as well have been from another planet when compared with student "samples".

It compounds the difficulty that most of the student samples in the literature were not in fact samples in any sense, They were just available groups.

The nature of the "samples" used by the authors below makes their findings very easy to understand. If you look at the tables of correlations their report, the correlations between conservatism and happiness were very weak, quite marginal. They were generally in the right direction but that is about all you can say

The fact of the matter is that happiness was by far best predicted by richness of experience. Young people like to be out and about doing and experiencing different things. That is what explains the findngs below. Their findings tell us nothing more than that.

Sad that such an extensive body of work yields such an unremarkable conclusion

Title and abstract only below:


Differing worldviews: The politics of happiness, meaning, and psychological richness

Abstract

Objective/Background
Conservative ideology, broadly speaking, has been widely linked to greater happiness and meaning in life. Is that true of all forms of a good life? We examined whether a psychologically rich life is associated with political orientation, system justification, and Protestant work ethic, independent of two other traditional forms of a good life: a happy life and a meaningful life.

Method
Participants completed a questionnaire that assessed conservative worldviews and three aspects of well-being (N = 583 in Study 1; N = 348 in Study 2; N = 436 in Study 3; N = 1,217 in Study 4; N = 2,176 in Study 5; N = 516 in Study 6).

Results
Happiness was associated with political conservatism and system justification, and meaning in life was associated with Protestant work ethic. In contrast, zero-order correlations showed that psychological richness was not associated with conservative worldviews. However, when happiness and meaning in life were included in multiple regression models, the nature of the association shifted: Psychological richness was consistently inversely associated with system justification and on average less political conservatism, suggesting that happiness and meaning in life were suppressor variables.

Conclusions
These findings suggest that happiness and meaning in life are associated with conservative ideology, whereas psychological richness is not.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jopy.12959

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