Pew Survey: Conservatives Are Indeed Happier Than Liberals

June 24, 2008 · Filed Under Liberals, Science, World News

We all heard about the Pew Study released some weeks back that found conservatives to be much happier than liberals. Researchers at New York University wanted to study the issue further to try and find out why that is.

Here’s what they found:

But New York University researchers set out to isolate the reasons why right-wingers would have greater subjective well-being than left-wingers.

They collected data from nearly 1,200 people from the 2000 American National Election Study and found that above the effects of gender, marital status, income, religion and age, the reason for this happiness disparity can be distilled to the separate ideologies of liberals and conservatives.

The authors argue that a conservative belief acts as a psychological buffer in a world of increasing inequality. The idea is that conservatives tend to rationalize inequality as the result of a fair process in a meritocracy, whereas liberals tend to see inequality as inherently unjust.

Analyses with data from 9,000 people across 10 countries uncovered the pattern that, not only do right-wingers report greater life satisfaction across cultures, but the gap widens in those countries where quality of life is low.

Finally, the authors looked at U.S. data spanning the past 30 years, and found that increasing economic inequality is associated with the decrease in the nation’s overall happiness. But noted they found that liberals’ self-reported happiness decreased more steeply than that of conservatives.

Liberals tend to be “glass half-empty” kind of people, while conservatives tend to be more “glass half-full” kind of people. Liberals tend to focus almost exclusively on what’s wrong with America, while conservatives tend to celebrate the good things about America.

Liberals always have to have a cause of some kind. Something they can protest about, blog about, sign petitions about, or air a particular grievance. Whether it’s global warming, Iraq, FISA, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, or President Bush, liberals have to have something to be outraged about.

A can’t think of an issue that could would ever get conservatives to put on ridiculous costumes and march on Washington, or protest Senate hearings.

In any case, the study is pretty interesting.