#QUOTE ABOUT CONERVATIVES AND LIBERAS SOFTWARE#
#QUOTE ABOUT CONERVATIVES AND LIBERAS SERIES#

But he agrees that 'this research quickly raises philosophical questions about what it means to be happy at all.It's a distinction we learn as kids. The study, he says, 'raises questions about the validity of happiness self-report measures generally.' Kahan wonders if happiness surveys 'are truly measuring what we care about.'įor his part, Wojcik is optimistic about the future of happiness research. 'Conservatives don't seem to be any happier than liberals,' concludes Dan Kahan, a psychologist at Yale University who was not involved in the study but has waded through battles about the minds of liberals versus conservatives himself. Democratic members were scored as having slightly more genuine smiles than Republicans. Second, the researchers hired an expert in facial expression analysis to examine the photos of current members of Congress. People who follow the Republican Party on Twitter were somewhat more likely to use emotionally negative words than were followers of the Democratic Party.

#QUOTE ABOUT CONERVATIVES AND LIBERAS SOFTWARE#

First they used language-processing software to measure the positive and negative emotions of 47,257 tweets. The researchers also used two other measures to gauge the happiness of liberals and conservatives, neither of which indicated greater conservative happiness. That effect is tiny, but still big enough to explain away the happiness gap, according to the researchers. Sure enough, the new study finds that people's political conservatism was slightly correlated with their tendency to self-enhance. That instrument measures 'the tendency to engage in self-deceptive enhancement.' For example, people who highly agree with statements such as 'I am fully in control of my own fate,' or, 'I never regret my decisions,' are deemed to be self-enhancing.

#QUOTE ABOUT CONERVATIVES AND LIBERAS SERIES#

A total of 1433 people filled out and submitted not only the standard happiness questionnaire but also a series of questions called the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding. To get enough subjects to nail down this tiny statistical effect, the researchers used a website-open to people of any political persuasion. To test that possibility, Sean Wojcik, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues devised a study that aimed to assess not just happiness but also people's tendency to self-enhance. Rather than truly being happier than liberals, conservatives may be more prone to put a positive spin on their lives. Conservatives could be more content with the status quo, according to one argument, or liberals may be prone to anxious self-reflection.īut there could be a simpler explanation. Psychologists have proposed myriad hypotheses to explain the gap. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing. Examples include: 'The conditions of my life are excellent. Those results are generally based on surveys that ask respondents, for example, to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 how well a statement applies to them. Conservative Americans, Canadians, and Europeans all seem to be happier than their liberal compatriots. The purported happiness gap between liberals and conservatives has attracted considerable media attention. Some of those factors seem obvious: Living in destitution in an affluent nation is strongly associated with unhappiness.

So researchers have combed through demographic data in search of factors associated with lesser and greater happiness.

Plus, the results matter to policymakers: People's happiness correlates with important life outcomes such as health, wealth, and even life expectancy. One reason is that the tool used by nearly all studies in this field-surveys asking people to self-report their happiness on numerical scales-is cheap and easy to implement. According to a new study published online today in Science, the tiny differences found in previous studies may have resulted from a slight tendency on the part of political conservatives to 'self-enhance,' or view themselves in an unrealistically positive light. This so-called 'ideological happiness gap' has inspired elaborate theories for why conservatives enjoy life more than liberals do.īut there may be no happiness gap at all. Years of psychological research have suggested that people who are politically conservative are happier than their liberal counterparts.

Quote about conervatives and liberas