Study Reveals Why Political Conservatives Are Happier than Liberal Counterparts

By Robert Polner

The question may strike some as curious: Why are political conservatives happier than liberals? John T. Jost, a professor in the Department of Psychology at NYU, tried to find out.
    Jost, whose research is supported in part by NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response, followed up on a much-discussed 2006 public opinion survey issued by the Pew Research Center, which found that 47 percent of conservative Republicans described themselves as “very happy” compared with 28 percent of liberal Democrats.
    Jost sought to explain this “happiness gap,” and found, through research with NYU’s Jaime L. Napier, that demographic factors—including income, education, gender, age, religiosity and marital status— play a significant role. Their work was published earlier this year in the magazine Psychological Science.
     But demographics were only part of the answer.
    In their research, Jost and Napier conducted three analyses in which they examined the relationship between political ideology and subjective well being, tapping the Pew sample, additional public opinion surveys in the U.S. and Europe, and macro-economic data.
    From a psychological perspective, they wrote,  “Liberals tend to enjoy thinking more and to prolong cognitive closure, whereas conservatives tend to prefer relatively simple, unambiguous answers to life’s questions.”
    Still, this difference did not account for the gap in subjective well-being.
     A second possible factor arises from other research literature they considered, which demonstrates that “political conservatism is a ‘system-justifying ideology’ in that it is associated with the endorsement of a fairly wide range of rationalizations of current social, economic, and political institutions and arrangements”—that is, a set of beliefs generally associated with high personal satisfaction.
    Indeed, conservative Repub¬licans tend to accept and justify as fair and legitimate the relatively large degree of economic inequality in the United States, and this helps to maintain their greater degree of self-reported happiness. The effect is replicated for respondents who have been surveyed throughout Europe. Liberal Democrats, in contrast, are more bothered by social inequality. Thus, as economic inequality has increased significantly over the last 30 years, liberals’ subjective well-being has dropped more precipitously than that of conservatives because, as Jost and Napier say, they may be “less ideologically prepared to rationalize the degree of inequality in society.”