How To Understand the Well-Being Gap Between Liberals and Conservatives, by Musa al-Gharbi in American Affairs.
Academic research consistently finds the same pattern. Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives. The effects of conservatism seem to be enhanced when conservatives are surrounded by others like themselves. However, in an analysis looking at ninety countries from 1981 through 2014, the social psychologists Olga Stavrova and Maike Luhmann found “the positive association between conservative ideology and happiness only rarely reversed. Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries and never in the United States.”
Al-Gharbi notes what the prevailing hypotheses are why this is true, and which are more likely to be correct given the data. Please know in advance that this is an area where a variety people seem to have first developed a theory they liked and then convinced themselves it must be true, because it sounds right.
4 comments:
One thing that stood out is the graph showing "have you ever been told" vs age--and despite having had fewer years of potential interactions with doctors, the young are told far more often than the old that "they have a mental problem". Is this a matter of people expecting to hear that they have a problem and seeking a diagnosis for problems that might merely demand work-arounds in their lives (that earlier generations have done)? Or are they genuinely more afflicted to a degree that older generations were not?
The question that came to mind is "how do they measure happiness?" I gather it is more or less standardized, but we've known people who looked so hard for things to complain about that I have to believe they were happier that way. Maybe, as mentioned in the text, the liberal self-evaluation depends on how empathetic they consider themselves, so they end up misreporting their own emotions.
Perhaps if you expect that there can be perfection on earth, you're more alive to deviations from perfection in others and even in yourself.
How does one define conservative? Or liberal? Is it by political ideology? I'd say Americans tend to avoid European-style ideology. I wouldn't expect any five liberals to agree on a platform, nor a group of five conservatives. By religion? Render unto Caesar... I suspect "religiosity," in the studies, may be measured in different ways. Is it belief, self-description, or attending religious services?
Or is it by lifestyle choices, such as settling down, starting a family, eschewing recreational drugs? When I worked at the polls, I wouldn't say conservative voters were more attractive, but they did dress respectably.
At any rate, people don't sort themselves into neat categories.
I think I've mentioned this before, but this NYT opinion piece, and the comments thereof, made me sad: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/opinion/natalism-liberalism-parenthood.html
Political ideology and happiness level appear to be correlated in individuals. Whether political ideology is a cause of happiness, or vice versa, is unclear. James's points also apply. Also, happiness and unhappiness are vague concepts and not necessarily the inverses of each other; neither "happiness" nor "unhappiness" is obviously a good variable.
My hunch is that 1) the people who self-describe as politically conservative tend to self-describe as happy, and 2) the people who self-describe as the most unhappy or discontented tend to self-describe as politically left-wing. So the mean happiness level of leftists may be skewed lower by a subset consisting of the most unhappy people; it's conceivable that if you ignore the extreme malcontents, left/right happiness levels are closer to each other than many of these discussions imply.
All of these are solid cautions.
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