Personality Predicts Your Political Beliefs

Added: 2026-05-29

[00:00:00]If you gave a thousand people a list of adjectives to describe themselves with and one of the adjectives was happy and another of the adjectives was social, you'd find that those who rated themselves high on happy would also rate themselves high on social and those who rated themselves low on happy would also rate themselves low on social. And by looking at those patterns of covariation, you can determine what the essential dimensions are of human personality.

[00:00:33]One of the dimensions is roughly happiness. That's extraversion. Another dimension is neuroticism. It's a negative emotion dimension. So, if you ask someone if they're anxious and they score high, say, on a scale of 1 to 7, they're also likely to score high on another item that says that they're sad.

[00:00:57]And it turns out that negative emotions clump together. And so that people who experience more of one negative emotion have a propensity to experience more of all of them. There's another dimension called agreeableness.

[00:01:11]And agreeable people are self-sacrificing, compassionate, and polite. If you're dealing with an agreeable person, they don't like conflict. They care for other people. Um, if you're dealing with an agreeable person, they're likely to put your concerns ahead of theirs. They're non-competitive and cooperative. Uh it's a dimension where women are women score more highly than men on agreeableness across cultures including those cultures where the largest steps have been taken towards producing an egalitarian social circumstance like Scandinavia. Actually the gender differences in personality there are larger than they are anywhere else. Um another trait is conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is an excellent trait if you want to do well in in school and in work, especially if you're a manager and administrator.

[00:02:08]I can't say we understand a lot about conscientiousness, although it it reliably emerges from factor analytic studies of adjective groups across different countries. Conscientious people are diligent, industrious, and orderly. Their orderliness tilts them towards political conservatism, by the way, because it turns out that your inbuilt temperament, your inbuilt personality, which constitutes a set of filters through which you view the world, also alters the manner in which you process information and influences the way that you vote. And so you might say, and I I do believe that this is true, our we've been doing a lot of research on this as of late, the more accurate a measure you take of someone's political beliefs, the more you find that personality is what's predicting them. And I I think that's a reasonable thing to think about because, you know, you have to you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world, right? Because you just can't do everything. And so people are specialized. They have specialized niches that they occupy. You could think about them as social niches. A niche is a place where your particular skills would serve to maintain you. And so if you're extroverted, you're going to look for a social niche because you like to be around people.

[00:03:23]And if you're introverted, you're going to spend much more time on your own. And so if you're an introverted person, for example, you're going to want a job where you're not selling and where you're not surrounded by groups of people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you out. Whereas if you're extroverted, that's just exactly what you want. And so the extrovert sees the world as a place of social opportunity. And the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat from and spend time alone. And it turns out that both of those modes of being are valid. The the issue, at least to some degree, is whether or not you're fortunate enough to match your temperament with the demands of the environment. And I suppose also whether you're fortunate enough fortunate enough so that you're born in an era where there actually is a niche for your particular temperament because it isn't necessarily the case that that will be the case. You imagine that all of these temperamental dimensions vary because of evolutionary pressure, right? So there's a distribution of extraversion, a normal distribution. Most people are somewhere in the middle and then as you go out towards the extremes, there are fewer and fewer people. And what that means is that on average across large spans of time, there have been environments that match every single position on that distribution with mo most of the environments matching the center because otherwise we wouldn't have evolved that way. And so sometimes being really extroverted is going to work well for you in a minority of environments, a minority of niches, and sometimes it's just going to be a catastrophe. I suspect, for example, that if you live in a tyrannical society where any sign of of of of personally oriented activity is likely to get you in trouble, that being extroverted and low in neuroticism wouldn't be a very good idea because you're going to be mouthy and happy and saying a lot of things, unable to keep your thoughts to yourself, and you're going to be relatively fearless. Now, I don't know that for sure because we've haven't done the studies that precisely match temperamental proclivity to environmental demand, but you get what I mean. So, conscientious people anyways, conscientious people are industrious and orderly. We know a little bit about orderliness. It seems to be associated, strangely enough, with disgust sensitivity, which I suppose isn't that surprising. You know, if you take an orderly person and you put them in a messy kitchen, they respond with disgust and want nothing more than to straighten it all out and organize it and clean it.

[00:05:57]And there's tremendous variability in order. Um, and as I said, orderliness predicts political conservatism. It's not the only thing, but it's certainly one of the things. Um the correlation between conscientiousness and and grades is about 04. It's about 16% of the variance. It's it's the second best predictor of university grades after intelligence. And we'll talk about intelligence during this course, too.

[00:06:26]Intelligence is actually a relatively straightforward concept. I don't think I'll get into it today, but conscientious people, their industriousness and their orderliness makes them schedule their time. So they make efficient use of their time. They use schedules and that sort of thing. We haven't been able to figure out anything about the underlying biology or psychology of industriousness. We we've tried really dozens and dozens of tests attempting to find a laboratory measure on which industrious people do better and we failed completely. And there's no animal models of industriousness either.

[00:07:01]And so I would say it's a great mystery that remains at the heart of trait psychology. Um, and maybe it's a human specific category, you know, I mean, you can think of sled dogs maybe of being industrious and maybe and maybe sheep dogs and animals that work like that, but of course they've been trained by human beings. So, but it isn't obvious that animals are industrious the same way we are. I mean, industriousness involves sacrificing the present for the future, something like that. and you it seems like you have to be able to conceptualize time in order to sacrifice the present for the future. One of the things that I would recommend that you do as students um in this course and and maybe in every course speaking of industriousness is come up with a plan of attack for the course and use a scheduleuler. You know, if you treat your university career like a full-time job, you're much more likely to succeed. And if you keep up on the readings and you keep up on the on the essays and all of that, then you're much like less likely as well to fall into despair when you get too far behind using a Google calendar or something like that to organize a schedule for the entire semester at the beginning of the semester can be invaluable, especially if you're not very industriousness, very industrious because it can keep you on track. And one of the things we know about industrious people is that they are very good at using schedules and at planning the use of their time. And so I would like to say that you should all be smarter, but I don't know how you could be smarter. We don't know anything about how to improve intelligence. And I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either. But I can tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then they do whatever they can to stick to the strategy. And so, for example, if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours, 3 hours, and you filled in a Google calendar, whatever you happen to use with a a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that, and when you're going to sit down and study, then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before, you know, an important exam.

[00:09:19]It's also a very ineffective way of studying by the way. I mean, first of all, people who cram for 10 hours say they're studying for 10 hours, but they rarely are because, well, I can't study for 10 hours. I don't have the power of concentration that would enable me to do that for that prolonged period of time. I can manage about 3 hours of intense intellectual activity before I'm pretty done. And it's also the case that if you study and then sleep and then study and then sleep and then study and then sleep, you space it out, then you're much more likely to remember. It's also much more likely that you're you're much more likely to remember if you try to recall the material. And so highlighting in that sort of thing isn't very useful. But reading, closing the book, summarizing what you've read without opening the damn book, that's useful. And the reason for that is that you're practicing remembering. And that's what you have to practice. If you're practicing memorization, you have to practice remembering. You don't just go over the thing o over and over. That'll help you with recognition memory, but some, but it won't help you with recall memory.

[00:10:25]Anyways, the last trait is openness.

[00:10:28]Openness is a creativity trait. It's also associated with intelligence in that intelligent people, and I'm speaking technically of IQ tend to be higher in tend to be more creative, which is hardly surprising.

[00:10:41]Creative people are more likely to be liberal politically, by the way. Um, they like novelty. They like aesthetics.

[00:10:49]They like fiction. They like movies.

[00:10:51]They like art. They like poetry. There's something about them that grants them an aesthetic sensitivity. And and that's a that's an inbuilt trait. And um it's not the case, by the way, that everyone's creative. In fact, far from it. uh we've used the creative achievement questionnaire to to measure people's creativity. I'll talk to you about that later in the class. And the creative achievement questionnaire takes 13 dimensions of creativity. So, you know, writing, dancing, acting, scientific investigation, entrepreneurial activity, architectural activity, uh cooking, um there's a there's a handful of others, singing, etc. you know, the sorts of things that you would assume that people could be creative about. And then it asks people to rate themselves on a scale from 1 to 10 on their level of achievement with regards to all those creative domains with zero being I have no training or proficiency in this area.

[00:11:50]And 70% of people score zero across the entire creative achievement questionnaire. A tiny proportion of people are outliers way out their creative in many dimensions simultaneously. and exceptionally creative. And it turns out, as you'll find out, that that pattern, which is called a Pareto distribution, where most people stack up at zero and a few people are way out on the creative end, characterizes all sorts of distributions, like the distribution of money, for example, which is why 1% of the people have the overwhelming majority of the money. It's a different 1% across time. It like it churns. And you're much more likely to be in the 1% if you're older, logically enough, because one of the things you do as you age is you trade youth for money if you're fortunate. I don't think the trade is really worth it, but that's the best you've got. So anyways, those particular traits, you can think of those as ways that you simplify the world, right? There's lots of different places that you can act in the world, and there's lots of different ways you can look at it and survive. That's why you can be a plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and th those all work, right?

[00:13:04]Even though they're very different modes of being and you can have different personalities and survive as long as you're capable of finding the place where your particular filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment. And a huge part I would say of successful adaptation is precisely that.