Are Conservatives Happier Than Liberals?

In the old Freudian days therapists focused on the negative to the detriment of the positive.

They wanted to accentuate the negative and ignore the positive.

Then, one day cognitive psychologists, led by Martin Seligman, decided that the focus was wrong. No one was getting better by looking only at the dark side. So, they invented the field that is now called positive psychology.

They emphasize positive emotions, positive character traits, success and happiness.

Instead of seeing human life as an inexorable tragedy punctuated with a few bright spots, they redefined it as a constructive process mixed with a few setbacks.

And they reconstructed therapy to make it more constructive, more oriented toward success.

Now, new research from Prof. Jaime Napier of Yale University has taken this concept in a new direction. Napier has discovered that conservatives are generally more happy than liberals.

You see, you need not undergo an endless round of therapy. You can enhance your happiness by becoming more conservative.

I hope I didn’t just ruin your day.

PBS reported on Napier’s research:

If you follow the principles of positive psychology it makes sense that liberals would be unhappier than conservatives. 

Liberals are more focused on human misery. They obsess about everything that is wrong with society. They are constantly complaining about social injustice, income inequality, sexism, air pollution, and fracking.

While it is true that liberals want to eliminate all of those negatives, their preoccupation with everything that has gone wrong must be diminishing their happiness.

Conservatives think differently. They do not ignore problems, but they do not complain about them. They do not see America’s problems as identifying traits. They see them as aberrations.

Conservatives do not obsess about what is wrong with America; they see America as a great and exceptional nation that has provided a wealth of opportunity.  

According to the principles of positive psychology the person who sees the glass as half full is going to be happier than the person who sees the glass as half empty.

Napier explains it by saying that conservatives believe that the economy provides opportunity and rewards hard work. They believe that the system is mostly fair. They believe that people mostly succeed according to their merit.

Liberals tend to believe that life is unfair and that the system cannot rectify itself. They do not believe in markets. They insist that without regulators and bureaucrats, we would be living according to the law of the jungle.

Of course, it is a bit facile to divide people into these categories. Conservatives do know that the system is not always fair; if they are sensible they believe that it is mostly fair, that it tends to reward hard work and merit, not that it always and unfailingly does.

Most liberals do accept that the system is sometimes fair and just. For the most part, however, they know that the system is corrupt, geared to enrich the rich and immiserate the poor.

Conservatives see opportunity. They strive to profit from it. Liberals believe that they cannot win, unless they are the ones who are rigging the system.

I agree with Napier’s characterization of liberal and conservative belief systems, but I would like to offer a different concept, one that I have discussed before.

Some people see life as a game; others see it as theatre. If life is a game your actions affect the outcome. Playing a game makes you a moral agent, responsible for your successes and failures. It's empowering.

If the game is fair—most are—you know that you will be rewarded according to your actions and abilities.

The game might be rigged. Someone might be cheating. Someone might even be bending the rules. But, if the game is fair and everyone is playing by the same rules its outcomes are reliable. It’s a bit like a market.

If you have learned from the wrong kind of therapy that life is theatre, then your role is to follow the script. Since the script has been written out in advance, it will move inexorably toward a predetermined outcome, regardless of what you do.

If your life is scripted, you have little to gain by hard work. Why waste your energy trying to change the results when they have already been decided?

Let’s credit the positive psychologists with conceptualizing these differences. Now, we are waiting for them to conclude that people do not have to do therapy to be happy. They just need to become more conservative.