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The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives:

Personality Profiles, Interaction Styles, and the

Things They Leave Behind

Dana R. CarneyColumbia University

John T. Jost

New York University

Samuel D. Gosling

University of Texas at Austin

Jeff PotterCambridge, Massachusetts

Although skeptics continue to doubt that most people are ideological, evidence sug-

gests 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 aBig Five framework, we find that two traits, Openness to New Experiences and Con-

scientiousness, 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 charac-

teristics 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) dimen-

sions of ideology. In general, liberals are more open-minded, creative, curious, and

Political Psychology, Vol. 29, No. 6, 2008

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novelty seeking, whereas conservatives are more orderly, conventional, and better

organized.

KEY WORDS: Political orientation, Ideology, Liberalism, Conservatism, Personality, Openness,

Conscientiousness, Nonverbal behavior

The individuals pattern of thought, whatever its content, reflects his

personality and is not merely an aggregate of opinions picked up helter-

skelter from the ideological environment.

(Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950, p. 176)

Despite evidence of stark ideological polarization in American and Euro-

pean politics (Abramowitz & Saunders, 2005; Bishop, 2004; Bobbio, 1996; Jost,

2006), a number of sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists remain

skeptical about the notion that most people are ideological in any stable, con-

sistent, or profound sense (Baker, 2005; Bishop, 2005; Converse, 2000; Fiorina,

Abrams, & Pope, 2006; McGuire, 1999; Zaller, 1992). There are several reasons

for the skepticism, and many of these can be traced to theoretical and empirical

claims first made in the 1950s and 1960s by Raymond Aron, Edward Shils,

Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, and Philip Converse. These end-of-ideology pro-

ponents argued that there were no major differences between the left and right

in terms of political content or psychological characteristics and that there was

no compelling cognitive or motivational structure to ideologies such as liberal-

ism and conservatism. Jost (2006) reevaluated these skeptical claims and con-

cluded that, although ordinary citizens may fail strict tests of ideological

sophistication, most people can and do use ideological constructs such as liber-

alism and conservatism meaningfully and appropriately and that they are indeed

motivated by ideological commitments that guide (or constrain) both attitudes

and behaviors.

Skepticism about the role of ideology in everyday life persists at least in part

because of the ambiguity and multiplicity of definitions of the term that pervade

both popular and scientific discussions (Gerring, 1997; see also Jost, 2006, pp.

652654). In this article, we conceptualize political ideology in terms of ones

relative position on an abstract left-right (or liberal-conservative) dimension that is

comprised of two core aspects that tend to be correlated with one another, namely:

(a) acceptance versus rejection of inequality and (b) preference for social change

vs. preservation of the societal status quo (see also Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, &

Sulloway, 2003a, 2003b; Jost, Nosek, & Gosling, 2008). The theoretical possibil-

ity we investigate in this research program is that, as Tomkins (1963) argued long

ago, ideological differences between the left and right are partially rooted in basic

personality dispositions. That is, ideology both reflects and reinforces individual

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Theories of Personality and Political Orientation

For almost as long as social scientists have located political orientation on a

single left-right (or, in the United States, a liberal-conservative) dimension, they

have speculated about the personality characteristics that typify each ideological

pole (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950; Constantini &

Craik, 1980; DiRenzo, 1974; Eysenck, 1954; McClosky, 1958; Tomkins, 1963).

As Tetlock and Mitchell (1993) have pointed out, it is possible to generate either

flattering or unflattering psychological portraits at either end of the political

spectrum. The important question, from a scientific point of view, is not whether

any given theory is gratifying to left-wing or right-wing audiences, but whether it

possesses truth value. Obtaining an accurate understanding of the personality

needs and characteristics of liberals and conservatives has taken on added urgency

in the current political climate, in which people from liberal blue states find it

increasingly difficult to understand people from conservative red states and vice

versa (see Abramowitz & Saunders, 2005; Bishop, 2004; Rentfrow, Jost, Gosling,

& Potter, 2009).

In this article, we draw on eclectic sources of data to investigate the degree to

which historical speculations concerning the traits of liberals and conservatives

possess genuine diagnostic utility, that is, empirical accuracy.1 We address three

main questions. First, does political orientation covary with basic psychological

dimensions in the ways that have been suggested (but seldom comprehensively

investigated) by theorists over the past several decades? Second, what, specifically,

are the differences (as well as similarities) between liberals and conservatives in

terms of personality profiles and dispositions, and how strong are they? Third, if

there are indeed meaningful psychological differences between liberals and con-

servatives, how are they manifested in daily behavior?

Influential theories mapping personality profiles to political ideology were

developed by Fromm (1947, 1964), Adorno et al. (1950), Tomkins (1963), Brown

(1965), Bem (1970), and Wilson (1973), among others. In this section, we review

a number of these perspectives, which span the last 75 years. All of these theories

assume that specific ideologies have for different individuals, different degrees of

appeal, a matter that depends upon the individuals needs and the degree to which

these needs are being satisfied or frustrated (Adorno et al., 1950, p. 2). Although

the specific personality needs and characteristics under investigation (italicized

below) have varied somewhat across cultural contexts and historical periods, we

will show that the underlying contents identified by diverse theorists and observers

converge to a remarkable degree. Moreover, these characterizations are broadly

consistent with a psychological theory of political ideology as motivated social

1 For purposes of simplicity in exposition we frequently use the categorical terms of liberalsd i l h h h l b l f i l f i l d l i di i

809Liberals and Conservatives

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cognition (Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b) and the hypothesis that dispositional (as well

as situational) differences in epistemic and existential needs to manage uncertainty

and threat are linked to individual preferences for liberalism versus conservatism

(Jost et al., 2007).

Early Theories, 193055

Early accounts of personality differences between left-wingers and right-

wingers focused largely on issues that would come to define the syndrome of

authoritarianism. Roger Brown (1965) famously recounted the work of Nazi

psychologist Erich Jaensch (1938), who proposed one of the first distinctions

between two personality types with clear political significance. The J-type, accord-

ing to Jaensch, was predisposed to make a good Nazi: J made definite, unam-

biguous perceptual judgments and persistedin them . . . [he] would recognize that

human behavior is fixed by blood, soil, and national tradition . . . would be tough,

masculine, firm; a man you could rely on (Brown, 1965, p. 478, emphasis added).

By contrast, the S-Type was someone of racially mixed heredity and included

Jews, Parisians, East Asians, and communists. As Brown observed:

The S-Type [described a] synaesthetic: one who enjoys concomitant

sensation, a subjective experience from another sense than the one being

stimulated, as in color hearing. Synaesthesia, which we are likely to

regard as a poets gift, seemed to Jaensch to be a kind of perceptual

slovenliness, the qualities of one sense carelessly mixed with those of

another . . . characterized by ambiguous and indefinite judgments and to

be lacking in perseverance. . . . The S would be a man with so-called

Liberal views; one who would think of environment and education as

the determinants of behavior; one who takes a childish wanton pleasure in

being eccentric, S would say individualistic. (Brown, 1965, p. 477,

emphasis added)

Adorno et al. (1950) accepted at least a few elements of Jaenschs (1938) descrip-

tion but viewed the aggressive J-type as a societal menace, an authoritarian, a

potential fascistnot as a cultural ideal. The right-wing personality type was

recast as rigid, conventional, intolerant, xenophobic, and obedient to authority

figures. Brown (1965) noted that What Jaensch called stability we called rigid-

ity and the flaccidity and eccentricity of Jaenschs despised S-Type were for us the

flexibility and individualism of the democratic equalitarian (p. 478, emphasis

added). It is remarkable that such diametrically opposed theorists as Jaensch and

Adorno would advance parallel personality theories linking general psychological

characteristics to specific ideological belief systems, but this is only one of many

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Members of the Frankfurt Schoolincluding Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer,

Reich, and otherswere strongly influenced by both Karl Marx and Sigmund

Freud. From Marx they inherited the notion that ideology is derived from eco-

nomic class interests and material conditions of the capitalist system. But to really

understand the relationship between the individual and society and the allure of

political and religious ideologies, these theorists needed a psychology. What was

available to them at the time was Freudian psychology, and so the members of the

Frankfurt School turned to Freuds writings on character structure. For example,

Freud identified one personality configuration that seemed particularly relevant to

political orientation:

The people I am about to describe are noteworthy for a regular combi-

nation of the three following characteristics. They are especially orderly,

parsimonious, and obstinate . . . Orderly covers the notion of bodily

cleanliness, as well as ofconscientiousness in carrying out small duties

and trustworthiness . . . Parsimony may appear in the exaggerated form

of avarice; and obstinacy can go over into defiance, to which rage and

revengefulness are easily joined . . . it seems to me incontestable that all

three in some way belong together. (Freud, 1959/1991, pp. 2126,

emphasis added)

Freud referred to this collection of traitsorderliness, parsimony, and

obstinacyas the anal character (see also Freud, 1930/1961, pp. 4044), but one

need not retain his scatological terminology to consider the possibility that these

characteristics tend to co-occur. Indeed, Sears (1936) found in a sample of 37

fraternity brothers that peer ratings of a given individuals degree of orderliness,

stinginess (parsimony), and obstinacy were significantly intercorrelated at .36 or

above (see also Hilgard, 1952, pp. 1516).

Fromm (1947) built on Freuds conception of the anal character, but he

renamed it the hoarding orientation and suggested that it was: Conservative,

less interested in ruthless acquisition than in methodical economic pursuits, based

on sound principles and on the preservation of what had been acquired (p. 81,

emphasis added). Fromm described the hoarding character in some detail:

This orientation makes people have little faith in anything new they might

get from the outside world; their security is based upon hoarding and

saving, while spending is felt to be a threat. . . Their miserliness refers to

money and material things as well as to feelings and thoughts . . . The

hoarding person often shows a particular kind of faithfulness toward

people and even toward memories . . . They know everything but are

sterile and incapable of productive thinking . . . One can recognize these


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Another characteristic element in this attitude is pedantic orderli-

ness . . . his orderliness is sterile and rigid. He cannot endure things out

of place and will automatically rearrange them . . . His compulsive clean-

liness is another expression of his need to undo contact with the outside

world. (Fromm, 1947, pp. 6566, emphasis added)

Although much of this description seems critical, Fromm explicitly cited both

positive and negative aspects of the hoarding (or preserving) orientation. The

positive traits he listed include being careful, reserved, practical, methodical,

orderly, loyal, and tenacious (p. 115). On the negative side, Fromm stressed that

this personality type could be stingy, cold, anxious, suspicious, stubborn, obses-

sional, and unimaginative.2

Middle Era Theories, 195580

Psychological investigations of the personalities of liberals and conservatives

between 1955 and 1980 built on the earlier work on authoritarianism but pondered

an ever-widening circle of traits. Daryl Bem (1970, pp. 1921) described an

unpublished study by Maccoby (1968) that set out to test Fromms (1964) theory

of the left-wing biophilous character and the right-wing necrophilous

character:

A person with intense love of life is attracted to that which is alive,

which grows, which is free and unpredictable. He has an aversion to

violence and all that destroys life . . . dislikes sterile and rigid order

. . . rejects being mechanized, becoming a lifeless part of machine-like

organization. He enjoys life in all its manifestations in contrast to mere

excitement or thrills. He believes in molding and influencing by love,

reason and example rather than by force . . . At the other pole, there

are individuals attracted to that which is rigidly ordered, mechanical,

and unalive. These people do not like anything free and uncontrolled.

They feel that people must be regulated within well-oiled machines.

(Maccoby, 1968, p. 2, quoted in Bem, 1970, p. 20, emphasis

added)

Maccoby and Fromm constructed a questionnaire to measure these two per-

sonality poles and found that supporters of liberal and left-wing candidates in the

1968 Presidential primaries (e.g., E. McCarthy, N. Rockefeller, and R. F.

Kennedy) scored disproportionately at the life-loving end of the scale, whereas

2 Al h h h h b di F (1947) h h i l

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supporters of conservative and right-wing candidates (e.g., R. Nixon, R. Reagan,

and G. Wallace) scored disproportionately at the mechanistic end of the scale.

Bem (1970) also noted that scores on this scale predicted liberal versus conserva-

tive opinions on specific issues. The distinction between life-loving and mecha-

nistic personality styles is noteworthy not only for its originality and the fact that

it received at least some empirical support in the late 1960s, but also because of the

fact that some features of the distinction (e.g., an attraction to unpredictable,

unconstrained life experiences vs. self-control, orderliness, and mechanistic coor-

dination) parallel other accounts of liberal versus conservative personality styles,

including Sylvan Tomkins (1963) theory of ideological polarity.

According to Tomkins (1963), people adopt ideo-affective postures toward

the world that are either leftist (stressing freedom and humanism) or rightist

(focusing on rule following and normative concerns). People who resonate with

left-wing ideologies believe that people are basically good and that the goal of

society should be to foster human creativity and experience. Those who resonate

with right-wing ideologies, by contrast, believe that people are inherently flawed

and that the function of society is to set rules and limits to prevent irresponsible

behavior. These differences, according to Tomkins, have important implications

for emotions and their control:

The left-wing theorist stresses the toxicity of affect control and inhibition,

and it therefore becomes a special case of the principle of minimizing

negative affect that such control should be kept to a minimum . . . He is

likely to stress the value both to the individual and to society of an

openness and tolerance for intrusions of the irrational, of the Dionysian

. . . The right-wing ideologist sets himself sternly against such intrusions

and argues for the importance of controlling affects in the interest of

morality, achievement, piety . . . he is for some norm, which may require

heroic mobilization of affect and energy to achieve or which may require

unrelenting hostility against those who challenge the good. (Tomkins,

1963, p. 407, emphasis added)

Like Fromm (1947), Tomkins saw advantages to both left-wing and right-wing

personality styles. Whereas the former is associated with humanism, creativity,

openness, and emotional expression (especially enthusiasm and excitement), the

latter is associated with norm attainment, conscientiousness, and morality. Several

studies have revealed that liberals score higher than conservatives on measures of

sensation seeking and imaginativeness (Feather, 1979, 1984; Levin & Schalmo,

1974), whereas conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of self-

control and orderliness (Constantini & Craik, 1980; Milbrath, 1962; St. Angelo &

Dyson, 1968).


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conservatives with earlier work on dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity.

The gist of the theory is that politically conservative individuals are driven by a

generalized susceptibility to experiencing threat or anxiety in the face of uncer-

tainty (Wilson, 1973, p. 259). Wilson and his collaborators suggested that

conservatism is determined by genetic factors such as trait anxiety, stimulus

aversion, and low IQ, as well as environmental factors, such as parental incon-

sistency and aggressiveness, low self-esteem, and low social class. Sources of

threat and/or uncertainty in the social world (e.g., death, dissent, immigration,

complexity, ambiguity, social change, and anarchy) were seen as prompting con-

servative ideological responses, including conventionalism, ethnocentrism,

authoritarianism, militarism, moral rigidity, and religious dogmatism. Much of

Wilsons account has received correlational support, most especially the notion

that situational and dispositional factors that produce heightened psychological

needs to reduce uncertainty and threat tend to be associated with proponents of

conservative (rather than liberal) ideology (see Jost et al., 2003a, for a meta-

analytic review).

Recent Theories, 19802007

Over the last quarter of a century, psychological accounts of differences

between liberals and conservatives have focused largely on the dimension of

open-mindedness versus closed-mindedness. Building on earlier traditions of

research on authoritarianism and uncertainty avoidance, numerous studies have

shown that liberals tend to score higher than conservatives on individual difference

measures of openness, cognitive flexibility, and integrative complexity (e.g., Alte-

meyer, 1998; Sidanius, 1985; Tetlock, 1983, 1984; Tetlock, Bernzweig, & Gallant,

1985). Furthermore, conservatives tend to possess stronger personal needs for

order, structure, closure, and decisiveness in comparison with liberals (e.g., Jost

et al., 2003a, 2003b; Kruglanski, 2005; Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez, 2004).

These findings and many others seem to fit an uncertainty-threat model of political

orientation, as summarized by Jost et al. (2003a):

We regard political conservatism as an ideological belief system that is

significantly (but not completely) related to motivational concerns having

to do with the psychological management of uncertainty and fear. Spe-

cifically, the avoidance of uncertainty (and the striving for certainty) may

be particularly tied to one core dimension of conservative thought, resis-

tance to change. . . . Similarly, concerns with fear and threat may be

linked to the second core dimension of conservatism, endorsement of

inequality. . . . Although resistance to change and support for inequality

are conceptually distinguishable, we have argued that they are psycho-

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Implications of this theoretical model were further tested by Bonanno and Jost

(2006); Jost et al. (2007); Amodio, Jost, Master, and Yee (2007); and Jost et al.

(2008).

A longitudinal study by Block and Block (2006) revealed that many of the

personality differences between liberals and conservatives that appear in adult-

hood are already present when children are in nursery school, long before they

define themselves in terms of political orientation. Specifically, preschool children

who later identified themselves as liberal were perceived by their teachers as:

self-reliant, energetic, emotionally expressive, gregarious, and impulsive. By

contrast, those children who later identified as conservative were seen as: rigid,

inhibited, indecisive, fearful, and overcontrolled. These findingsespecially in

conjunction with adult data (see Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b, for a summary) and

growing evidence that there is a heritable component of political attitudes (Alford,

Funk, & Hibbing, 2005)appear to substantiate the convictions of Adorno et al.,

Tomkins, Wilson, and many others that basic personality dimensions underlie

ideological differences between the left and right. The problem, however, is that

previous research on personality and political orientation over the last 75 years has

been far from systematic, coordinated, or cumulative. Each investigator (or team of

investigators) has merely added a new distinction or way of characterizing liberals

and conservatives without attempting to develop a common or shared framework

for interpreting and integrating the mass of theories and findings.

An Integrative Taxonomy and Overview of the Current Research

In an effort to distill a core set of personality characteristics that have been

theorized to distinguish between political liberals and conservatives, we have

listed in Table 1 the traits that have figured most prominently in relevant psycho-

logical theories since 1930. To help organize the resulting list into thematic

categories that could be used to guide our research program, we drew heavily upon

conceptual and empirical contributions of the Big Five model of personality,

which provides a useful organizing framework for classifying and measuring

distinct, relatively nonoverlapping personality dimensions (e.g., Goldberg, 1992;

John & Srivastava, 1999; McCrae & Costa, 1999; Wiggins, 1996). Because of the

unprecedented scope, comprehensiveness, and empirical backing of the Big Five

framework, we found it to be uniquely helpful as a means of cataloguing and

assessing the validity of the enormous number of trait descriptions of liberals and

conservatives that psychologists have generated over the last 75 years (see also

Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004). Thus, for each of the descriptive traits (or clusters of

traits) listed in Table 1, we have sought to identify which of the five basic person-

ality dimensions best capture the essence of the description. The result is a

remarkable consensus over more than seven decades (and across numerous cul-


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to be higher among liberalsand Conscientiousnesssometimes theorized to be

higher among conservatives. Traits associated with the other three dimensions

(Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) have occasionally been linked to

political orientation in previous theorizing (see Table 1), but their mention has

been far less frequent and consistent.

Moreover, profiles of liberals as relatively high on Openness (and low on

Conscientiousness) and conservatives as relatively high on Conscientiousness (and

Table 1. Personality Traits (and Their Big Five Classifications) Theorized to be Associated withLiberal (or Left-Wing) and Conservative (or Right-Wing) Orientation, 19302007

Liberal/Left-Wing Conservative/Right-Wing

Slovenly, ambiguous, indifferent1 (C-)

Eccentric, sensitive, individualistic1,3 (O+)

Open, tolerant, flexible2,3,9,20 (O+)

Life-loving, free, unpredictable7,8 (O+, C-, E+)

Creative, imaginative, curious9,10,11,20 (O+)

Expressive, enthusiastic9,22 (O+, E+)

Excited, sensation-seeking9,10,11,20 (O+, E+)

Desire for novelty, diversity9,20 (O+)

Uncontrolled, impulsive9,12,13,22 (C-, E+)

Complex, nuanced16,17,18,20,21 (O+)

Open-minded20,21 (O+)Open to experience10,11,20,23,24,25 (O+)

Definite, persistent, tenacious1,2,5 (C+)

Tough, masculine, firm1,2,3,18 (C+, A-)

Reliable, trustworthy, faithful, loyal1,4,5 (C+, A+)

Stable, consistent1,2 (C+, N-)

Rigid, intolerant2,3,5,7,8,15,18,20,22 (O-, A-)

Conventional, ordinary2,3,5,18 (O-, C+)

Obedient, conformist2,3,18 (O-, C+, A+)

Fearful, threatened2,15,18,20,22 (N+)

Xenophobic, prejudiced2,3,15,18,19 (O-, A-)

Orderly, organized4,5,7,8,12,13,14,20 (C+)

Parsimonious, thrifty, stingy4,5 (C+)Clean, sterile4,5,7,8 (C+)

Obstinate, stubborn4,5 (O-, C+, A-)

Aggressive, angry, vengeful2,3,4,15 (A-)

Careful, practical, methodical5 (O-, C+)

Withdrawn, reserved5,9 (E-)

Stern, cold, mechanical5,7,8,9 (O-, E-, A-)

Anxious, suspicious, obsessive5,6,15 (N+)

Self-controlled7,8,9,12,13,14 (C+)

Restrained, inhibited7,8,9,22 (O-, C+, E-)

Concerned with rules, norms7,8,9 (C+)

Moralistic9,15,18,28 (O-, C+)Simple, decisive19,20,21 (O-, C+)

Closed-minded20,21 (O-)

Conscientious25,26,27 (C+)

Sources: 1Jaensch (1938); 2Adorno et al. (1950); 3Brown (1965); 4Freud (1959/1991); 5Fromm

(1947); 6Kline & Cooper (1984); 7Maccoby (1968); 8Bem (1970); 9Tomkins (1963); 10Levin &

Schalmo (1974); 11Feather (1984); 12Milbrath (1962); 13St. Angelo & Dyson (1968); 14Constantini &

Craik (1980); 15Wilson (1973); 16Tetlock (1983, 1984); 17Sidanius (1985); 18Altemeyer (1998);19Van Hiel, Pandelaere, & Duriez (2004); 20Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway (2003a, 2003b);21Kruglanski (2005); 22Block & Block (2006); 23McCrae (1996); 24Barnea & Schwartz (1998);25

Gosling, Rentfrow, & Swann (2003);26

Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Zimbardo (1999);27

Rentfrow,Jost, Gosling, & Potter (2009); 28Haidt & Hersh (2001)

Note. O = Openness to Experience; C = Conscientiousness; E = Extraversion;

A = Agreeableness; N = Neuroticism; + = High; = Low

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According to Jost et al. (2003a, 2003b), political conservatism is an

ideological belief system that consists of two core components, resistance

to change and opposition to equality, which serve to reduce uncertainty

and threat. The idea is that there is an especially good fit between needs

to reduce uncertainty and threat, on one hand, and resistance to change

and acceptance of inequality, on the other, insofar as preserving the status

quo allows one to maintain what is familiarand known while rejecting the

risky, uncertain prospect of social change. The broader argument is that

ideological differences between right and left have psychological roots:

stability and hierarchy generally provide reassurance and structure,

whereas change and equality imply greater chaos and unpredictability.

(Jost et al., 2007, p. 990, emphasis added)

The general idea is that there is an underlying match or resonance between

general psychological characteristics and the specific contents of ideological

beliefs and opinions. In this sense, the liberal preference for social change and

equality both reflects and reinforces motivational needs for openness, creativity,

novelty, and rebelliousness, whereas the conservative preference for social stabil-

ity and hierarchy both reflects and reinforces the opposing motivational pull

toward order, structure, obedience, and duty (see also Jost, 2006).

Although direct attempts to understand personality differences between lib-

erals and conservatives in terms of Big Five dimensions have been rare (e.g., see

Caprara, Barbaranelli, & Zimbardo, 1999), several Big Five studies have included

measures of political orientation. The largely serendipitous results derived from

these studies are generally consistent with expectations gleaned from Table 1. By

far the most consistent finding is that liberals tend to score higher than conserva-

tives on self-report measures of Openness to New Experiences (e.g., Barnea &

Schwartz, 1998; Ekehammar, Akrami, & Gylje, 2004; Gosling, Rentfrow, &

Swann, 2003; Jost et al., 2003a, 2007; McCrae, 1996; Riemann, Grubich, Hempel,

Mergl, & Richter, 1993; Sidanius, 1978; Stenner, 2005; Trapnell, 1994; Van Hiel

& Mervielde, 2004). There is also some evidence that conservatives tend to score

slightly higher than liberals on Conscientiousness (Caprara et al., 1999; Ekeham-

mar et al., 2004; Gosling et al., 2003; Jost, 2006; Mehrabian, 1996; Van Hiel,

Mervielde, & De Fruyt, 2004). Stenner (2005) argued that Conscientiousness,

which is primarily associated with rigidity, orderliness, and a compulsion about

being in control of ones environment . . . promotes conservatism to a considerable

degree (p. 172). There is no consistent evidence in the research literature that

Neuroticism, Extroversion, or Agreeableness are reliably correlated with political

orientation, although some theorists have proposed differences between liberals

and conservatives on traits related to these dimensions (see Table 1).

In our first study we sought to determine definitively whether the two dimen-


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United States. We therefore examined correlations between scores on Big Five

dimensions and liberalism-conservatism in six different samples. At the same time,

we wanted to be sure that any personality differences were genuine and not

merely the result of divergent self-presentational strategies adopted by liberals and

conservatives. This was especially important given that many of the theories we

have reviewed predict differences that would emerge only in private, nonreactive

settings (e.g., cleanliness, expressiveness, and organization) or in the context of

interpersonal interaction (e.g., stubbornness, enthusiasm, and withdrawal). There-

fore, we went well beyond traditional self-report methods of personality assess-

ment in Study 1 to explore more subtle, unobtrusive differences (e.g., Webb,

Campbell, Schwartz, Sechrest, & Grove, 1981) with respect to nonverbal behavior

and social interaction styles (Study 2) and identity claims and behavioral residue

in living and working spaces (Study 3). Taken as a whole, these studies provide the

most sustained and comprehensive investigation of personality differences under-

lying political orientation to date.

Study 1: Personality Differences between Liberals and Conservatives

The goal of Study 1 was to obtain general personality profiles of liberals and

conservatives to assess the accuracy of the theoretical speculations adumbrated in

Table 1. It was hypothesized that, based on prior theory and research, liberals

would score higher than conservatives on Openness to New Experiences, whereas

conservatives would score higher than liberals on Conscientiousness. No consistent

differences between liberals and conservatives on the three other Big Five dimen-

sions (Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism) were expected. Personality

profiles were gathered in six different American samples (total N= 19,784) byusing individuals scores on each of the Big Five personality dimensions to predict

their political orientation. In this and in subsequent studies, political orientation

was assessed using self-report items, as is customary in the political science

literature (e.g., Knight, 1999). Although very short measures can be subject to

psychometric limitations, in many cases they are effective for assessing constructs

that are well understood by laypeople (e.g., Burisch, 1997; Gosling et al., 2003).

The single item measure of liberalism-conservatism, which was administered to

Samples 15, has been found in previous research to demonstrate good test-retest

reliability and predictive validity (e.g., see Fuchs & Klingemann, 1990; Jost, 2006;

Knight, 1999). Sample 6 completed three items, including separate measures of

social and economic dimensions of ideology to investigate the possibility that

personality exerts stronger effects on social (vs. economic) attitudes.

Method and Procedure

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participants (across samples) were female. Racial/ethnic group identification was

as follows: 60% European American, 23% Asian American, and 12% Latino; the

remaining 5% were of other ethnicities. Sample 1 completed the NEO-PI-R (Costa

& McCrae, 1985), which contains 240 items that are answered on a scale ranging

from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). Samples 24 completed the

44-item Big Five Inventory (BFI; John, Donahue, & Kentle, 1991) using either a

1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly) (Samples 2 and 4) or 1 to 5 (Sample 3)

scale.

Reliability was acceptable for all five factors and all four samples: Openness

(a = .90 for Sample 1, .77 for Sample 2, .76 for Sample 3, and .79 for Sample 4),Conscientiousness (a = .92, .76, .78, .77), Extraversion (a = .90, .89, .86, .87),Agreeableness (a = .89, .79, .82, .77), and Neuroticism (a = .92, .85, .79, .77).Participants indicated their political orientation on a scale ranging from 1 (liberal)

t o 9 (conservative) for Sample 1 (M= 5.02, SD = 2.30) and for Sample 4(M= 4.95, SD = 2.23). For Sample 2, the scale ranged from 1 (liberal) t o 7(conservative), M= 4.29, SD = 1.88, and for Sample 3 it ranged from 1 (liberal) to5 (conservative), M= 3.17, SD = 1.15.

Sample 5. Participants in Sample 5 were similar in terms of age and educa-

tional experience, but they constituted a larger and far more representative group.

They were part of the Gosling-Potter Internet Personality Project and were

recruited with the use of a noncommercial, advertisement-free website through

one of several channels: (1) major search engines (in response to keywords such as

personality tests), (2) portal sites, such as Yahoo! (under directories of person-

ality tests), (3) voluntary mailing lists that participants had previously joined, and

(4) word-of-mouth from other visitors. We analyzed data from 17,103 Ameri-

can, college-attending participants between the ages of 18 and 25 years old who

visited the website between March 2001 and May 2004. In terms of demographic

characteristics, 68% of the sample was female, 72% identified themselves as

European American, 8% as Asian American, 7% as African American, 7% as

Latino, and 1% as Native American; the remaining 5% declined to prove racial/

ethnic information about themselves.

Upon arrival at the website, participants opted to take a personality test. They

completed the same 44-item BFI used in Samples 24. Scale means, standard

deviations, reliabilities, and intercorrelations were consistent with those typically

obtained in laboratory studies (e.g., John et al., 1991). Participants were also asked

how politically conservative-liberal are you? They responded using a scale

ranging from 1 (extremely liberal) to 5 (extremely conservative), M= 2.94,SD = 1.40. Internal consistency for each of the Big Five constructs was adequate:Openness (a = .80), Conscientiousness (a = .81), Extraversion (a = .86), Agree-

ableness (a = .81), and Neuroticism (a = .83).Sample 6. Five hundred and thirty-six participants were recruited from the


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were European American, 5% were African American, 20% Asian American, and

15% Latino; the remaining 6% were of other ethnicities. Sample 6 completed the

Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI; Gosling et al., 2003), which contains 10

items (two tapping each of the Big 5 constructs). Items were answered on a scale

ranging from 1 (disagree strongly) to 7 (agree strongly). Because each subscale of

the TIPI consists of only two items, Cronbachs alphas were not computed.

However, as reported in Gosling et al. (2003), the TIPI is a reliable and valid

measure of personality.

To gauge political orientation as well as its independent social and economic

dimensions, participants responded to the following three questions on scales

ranging from 1 (extremely liberal) to 5 (extremely conservative): (1) Overall,

where would you place yourself, on the following scale of liberalism-

conservatism? (M= 3.01, SD = 1.01); (2) In terms of social and cultural issues(e.g., abortion, separation of church and state, affirmative action), where would

you place yourself on the following scale? (M= 2.91, SD = 1.28); and (3) Interms of economic issues (e.g., taxation, welfare, privatization of social security),

where would you place yourself on the following scale? (M= 3.19, SD = 1.04).Because of widespread interest in differences (as well as similarities) between

social and economic dimensions of political orientation (e.g., Duckitt, 2001), we

report the data separately for each of these three items and also for the composite

measure (a = .83).3

Results

For each of the six samples we conducted a simultaneous regression analysis

in which each of the scores on the five personality factors were used to predict

participants political orientation. This method enabled us to estimate the statisti-

cally unique contribution of each of the five personality dimensions, adjusting for

the effects of the other four. Unique effects are reported as unstandardized

regression coefficients (b) along with their standard errors (SE). Prior to analysis,

all variables were transformed to range from 0 to 1 so that the unstandardized

regression coefficients would be directly comparable and easily interpretable (see

Cohen, Cohen, Aiken, & West, 1999). Table 2 summarizes the results of these

analyses.

Samples 14. The same multiple regression model was used in Samples 14.

With regard to Sample 1, the five personality factors were significant predictors of

political orientation, R = .46, F (5, 84) = 4.25, p < .01, and accounted for 21% ofthe variance. The only significant unique predictor of political orientation was

Openness (b = -1.03, SE= .26, b = -.40, t [79] = -3.90, p < .001; see Table 2).

3 S h ll lib li i i b l l d i h h i di id l i

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Table2.RelationsbetweenBigFivePersonalityD

imensionsandPoliticalOrientation(Study1).

e

N

Personality

Instrument

Political

Measure

Relationw

ithliberalism-conservatism

O

C

E

A

N

e1

85

NEO-PI-R

Ideologicalself-placement

-1.03***

(.26)

.14

(.28)

.29

(.28)

.12

(.29)

-.18

(.25)

e2

79

BFI


-.13+

(.21)

.31

(.25)

.13

(.18)

-.03

(.23)

-.01

(.21)

e3

155

BFI


-.66***

(.16)

-.04

(.16)

.04

(.12)

.25

(.15)

.05

(.12)

e4

1,826

BFI


-.43***

(.05)

.11*

(.05)

-.02

(.04)

.12**

(.05)

-.13***

(.04)

e5

17,103

BFI


-.52***

(.02)

.15***

(.02)

.02

(.01)

.05**

(.02)

-.03*

(.01)

e6

536

TIPI

Compositemeasure(3items)

-.24**

(.09)

.18*

(.07)

.20**

(.07)

.08

(.09)

.11+

(.07)

Entries

areunstandardizedregressioncoe

fficients(b)frommultipleregressionsinwhicheachoftheBigFivescoreswereenteredassimultaneous

ors(withstandarderrorslistedinparent

heses).Priortoanalysis,allvariablesweretransformedtoa0to1

scalebyanchoringallvariablesatzero

vidingeachscalebyitsmaximumpossib

levalue.Personalityinstruments

(BFI,NEO-PI-R,andTIPI)aredescribedintheMethodssectionfor

1.O=

OpennesstoNewExperiences;

C=

Conscientiousness;E=E

xtraversion;A=

Agreeableness;andN=

Neuroticism.

0*p

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