At 8 p.m. on Sunday 7 May 2017, Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right party Front National, telephoned Emmanuel Macron to concede defeat in a presidential election that had changed the face of politics in France. Macron, who had formed his centrist party En Marche! only twelve months previously, swept to victory in a battle that seemed to transcend France’s traditional left versus right party system.
Having eliminated the major candidates of both left and right in the first round, Macron and Le Pen then pitched their alternative visions for the future of France to a disparate and divided electorate. Foremost on the agenda were nationalism, internationalism, immigration and the EU. In a campaign speech Le Pen described this new political landscape as a battle between ‘patriots and globalists’.
Two outsiders had redefined the French political landscape, reflecting ongoing political and economic changes seen across the Western world that are challenging the traditional distinctions between left and right.
As the BBC’s Mark Easton argued: ‘Conservative and Labour, left and right, capitalism and socialism – these ideological movements were a response to the economic and cultural challenges of power moving from the field to the factory. But power is moving again, from the national to the multinational. How citizens think we should respond to that shift is the new divide in our politics. It is less about left v right and more about nationalism v globalism.’
Easton is right that the ideological basis for the left and right is shifting. In the UK, for example, socioeconomic class is now a much weaker predictor of which way people will vote. However, the psychological profile behind left- and right-wing voters can still help us to understand this new political landscape; indeed, when you take the underlying psychological profile into account, the divide between patriots and globalists might not be so unexpected.
As a psychologist, I’m constantly astonished by just how much we can predict about a person if they describe themselves as left or right wing (or liberal or conservative). It doesn’t always enable us to know exactly which political policies that person will support, but we can make some reasonable guesses about their personality, moral values (as discussed in Chapter 1) – and even the size and activity of particular parts of their brain.
The origin of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ can be traced back to the French Revolution, when, in the newly established National Assembly, those supporting the king (and the established social order) would sit to the right of the chamber, and those advocating change would sit to the left. ‘Right wing’ and ‘left wing’ have since been used around the world to distinguish between supporters of ‘stability and social order’ on the right, and those in favour of ‘change and reform’ on the left. This distinction between a conservative party on the right and a party of change on the left still offers one of the most useful frameworks for understanding the main political fault lines in democracies around the world.1
Of course the specifics – the actual politics of left and right – vary from place to place. For example, in the UK or USA the right-wing parties are usually more enthusiastic about the free market, whereas in Eastern European countries that have moved away from communist rule, some parties on the left tend to be much more open to free-market capitalist policies, possibly because in these former communist states the move to the free market requires greater openness to change and reform. Even within the same country, context can be all-important: in the USA, for example, if someone says they are more liberal or conservative (roughly equivalent to left and right), their views might well depend on how ‘blue’ (Democratic) or ‘red’ (Republican) their state is.2 In Texas a person who identifies as a Democrat may not support very liberal policies such as abortion or gay marriage, which a voter in California might see as key points on the Democratic agenda.
The fact that the left–right divide has offered a useful framework over the centuries and in different countries suggests that it has important roots in our psyche, in ways that might even be shared across cultures.
What could that mean?
Well, let’s start with the basics: our genes. There seems to be something in our genetic make-up that predisposes us to be more left wing or right wing. For nearly fifty years, scientists have been studying identical twins to try to understand how much of their character or preferences comes from their genes, and how much comes from their environment.3 Identical twins have the same genetic code, so we can say with more certainty that similarities are likely to come from their genes (although, crucially, only if they haven’t grown up together). Overall, we’ve found that identical twins (raised separately) are more likely to share political views than non-identical twins. They don’t always have the same views, of course, but there’s enough similarity to suggest that, on everything from immigration to abortion to patriotism, having the same genes makes us more likely to agree.
In fact the correlation between having similar genes and having similar political beliefs is probably one of the most robust and replicated findings in political psychology, and one that holds true across a large number of countries.4 However, it still isn’t clear exactly how our genes influence our political beliefs – or our psychological traits and beliefs more generally. There are some clues, though: we can actually see differences in the brains and the physiological responses of people on different ends of the political spectrum.
In December 2010 the actor Colin Firth arrived as guest editor for BBC Radio 4’s current affairs programme Today with a burning question: are there any differences in the brains of people who are left wing and right wing? Along with the BBC’s science correspondent, Tom Feilden, he asked Geraint Rees from University College London’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience to investigate.
Rees initially carried out MRI scans on the brains of Conservative MP Alan Duncan and Labour MP Stephen Pound, and a sample of ninety young adults. He found that, surprisingly, the answer was yes: there were observable differences in the brains of those who identified as left or right wing. In fact, Rees could predict whether participants identified as liberal or conservative with around 70 per cent accuracy just by looking at the size and activity of two key parts of the brain: the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).5
So, how do those areas of the brain function?
The amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain, has become quite well known in recent years. If you look online you will find people (a little misleadingly) calling it the ‘lizard brain’ because it seems to have developed very early in our evolution (other mammals have an amygdala too, and we think it has some similar functions in their brains). It’s commonly associated with ‘fear’ but it’s more complex than that – it helps us process and remember emotions, as well as shaping our perception of threats. It’s so fundamental to how we perceive threats that a relatively direct connection from the eyes to the amygdala allows it to identify a threat before the rest of the brain has had a chance to even recognise what it’s seeing.6
Brain scans have shown that both size and activity in the amygdala varies widely in different people.7 In a paper titled ‘Red Brain, Blue Brain’, a group of researchers led by Darren Schreiber of the University of Exeter wanted to look at how the brains of liberals and conservatives differed when presented with a risk-taking scenario: a simple gambling game in which they had to choose between a lower ‘safe’ pay-off and a higher ‘risky’ pay-off.8 They found that, while left-wing people and right-wing people didn’t make different kinds of decisions, their brain activity was different: for those on the right, the amygdala was much more active. The conclusion was clear: how we deal with risk is closely related to how we respond to threat and conflict, and the greater activity in the amygdala shows that conservatives have a different cognitive process for thinking about risk, making them more sensitive to potential threats.
A similar discovery was made when observing physiological reactions. Our brains and our bodies show different responses, on average, depending on our political beliefs.
In 2008 a group of researchers led by Douglas R. Oxley at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln tested a number of people’s ‘galvanic skin responses’ by using electrodes to pick up changes in the electrical current on their skin (the same technology forms a key part of the polygraph used in lie-detector tests).9
When presented with something perceived as a threat, an involuntary response takes place in our bodies, driven by electrical signals in the nervous system initiated by parts of the brain (including the amygdala). Though everyone has these basic response patterns, our individual sensitivity to threats varies widely. Oxley wanted to know if those variations might be related to our political views.
After finding out whether a sample of people supported a range of more liberal or conservative policies, the team showed them a series of pictures, which included three threatening images: a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face and an open wound with maggots in it – images we can well imagine might provoke an involuntary response, especially when we’re not expecting them. Oxley and his colleagues found that those who supported more conservative policies showed a higher galvanic skin response than those who supported liberal policies.
All of this seems to suggest that those on the right are more sensitive to threats. But, what of those on the left?
In 2012, Oxley’s colleague John Hibbing replicated his findings on how liberals and conservatives responded to threatening images.10 But he wanted to go a step further. His team showed people similar negative images – a spider on someone’s face, an open wound with maggots on it and a crowd fighting with a man – but this time he also included three positive images: a happy child, a bowl of fruit and a cute rabbit.
The researchers found that conservatives reacted more strongly to the threatening images, as before. But they also found that liberals had a stronger physiological response to the positive images. So, when they saw the ‘happy’ pictures of the rabbit or the child, they had a stronger involuntary reaction than the conservatives did.
As well as measuring skin responses, the study also used eye-tracking software to see exactly how much attention subjects were giving to the positive or negative pictures. They showed both kinds of images at the same time, to see which the participants were most drawn to, and how long they looked at them for.
Given that those on the right had a stronger response to the threatening images, the researchers wanted to see if that meant they’d be more or less inclined to look at those images. What they found was that conservatives were more likely to focus on the negative stimuli, whereas – you guessed it – the liberals’ attention was drawn to the positive.
They concluded: ‘the political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad’ – and, in fact, that’s the title of the paper they wrote to explain their research.
It’s a striking difference – but there’s more. Coming back to Geraint Rees and Colin Firth’s study, you might recall that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) also uncovered differences between conservatives and liberals: the studies showed it is more active in liberals when they’re carrying out certain tasks.
The ACC is an area of the brain associated with decision-making and cognitive control. Crucially, we use it when we need to put in a bit of effort to carry out a task that requires a degree of flexible cognitive control.
In 2007 a group of researchers led by David Amodio at New York University set out to test the activity of the ACC in liberals and conservatives. They did this with a basic test called a ‘Go/No Go’ task, in which subjects had to rapidly press a button when they saw a signal, for example a red circle, but not press if that signal altered at all, for example, if it became a red square.11
Measuring people’s accuracy and reaction times, they found that liberals made fewer errors, and that at certain points during the task, the ACC was more active in liberals than conservatives. This flexibility in their responses – based in the ACC – shows a striking correspondence to the more general flexible attitude that liberals tend to take to social issues.
What does all this tell us?
Well, in the simplest terms, it shows that there is a link between size and activity in certain parts of the brain, physiological responses and people’s attitudes to society and politics.
But, as with so many interesting connections in science, we can’t definitively say at this stage that one thing causes the other, just because we’ve seen a correlation. For example, we might think that conservatives naturally have a larger amygdala, and that makes them more sensitive to threats. But how much we use certain parts of our brain can also influence the size of those areas.12 So, it might be that conservatives have a larger amygdala because they tend to focus more on threats, not vice versa.
Either way, the evidence points to a clear difference in how people interpret and respond to the world. And these physical differences do seem to relate in meaningful ways to our political leanings. If we have an increased sensitivity to threat, we might naturally view the world as a more dangerous place, so could be inclined to prioritise values like group loyalty and respect for authority. That could lead to support for increased spending on law and order, curbs on immigration, support for traditional values (such as those relating to family and religion) and stronger penalties for those who break the law.
In fact, researchers in the Netherlands have indeed found that there is a close correlation between the extent to which people view the world as a dangerous place, and the extent to which they think things like group loyalty and respect for authority are important moral principles.13
So maybe the moral differences we’ve seen on the left and the right have some roots in the way our brains and bodies respond to how dangerous we think the world is. Perhaps those on the right are biased to overemphasise threats – but we might also argue that those on the left are biased to neglect certain threats. For example, returning to the French Revolution, conservative thinkers at the time such as Edmund Burke – and indeed many conservative thinkers subsequently – argued that those calling for change often underestimated the potential threats to society when change happens too rapidly, especially in times of revolution or social upheaval. It could well be that being more aware of potential threats, and prioritising values such as loyalty and respect for authority are important for social cohesion.
Whatever the causal direction, it seems clear that on issues like immigration or terrorism, those on the left do have a tendency to see less of a threat than those on the right. The science doesn’t say whether this is a good or bad thing, or suggest anyone is right or wrong in their perceptions; but it can make us more aware of the different ways we are likely to respond to different social and political issues.
Advanced neuroimaging techniques and subtle measures of physiological responses to threat can reveal a lot about the psychology of those on the left or the right. But we don’t need an expensive brain scanner to understand many of the differences; we can tell a great deal simply by looking at the answers to a questionnaire.
If you’ve ever taken a personality test – maybe as part of a job interview or in an experiment – you might ask whether a simple questionnaire can really tell you much about who you are and how you make decisions.
The short answer is that it depends on the questions! There is actually a very serious science behind the design of questionnaires. If you get the questions (and response options) right, they can provide a meaningful measure of someone’s character, and they can certainly tell us quite a lot about how someone is likely to vote.
Psychologists have been trying to find a reliable way of mapping a person’s personality since the 1880s, and throughout the twentieth century many different theories were put forward as a way of categorising our various traits – with some doubting that there was even such a thing as ‘personality’.
Psychologists came to recognise that people do have stable personality traits that can help explain how they respond in a range of different situations. Based on this, in the 1980s a psychologist called Lewis Goldberg coined the term ‘Big Five’ to describe the main ways in which our personality might differ, and this has become the most widely used and reliable academic tool for measuring personality.
The Big Five breaks personality down into five components (with the helpful acronym OCEAN):14
Openness to new experiences: original, imaginative, broad interests and curious (the opposite might be conventional or uncreative in outlook)
Conscientiousness: careful, thorough, diligent and self-controlled (the opposite might be disorganised, careless and impulsive)
Extraversion: sociable, fun-loving, self-assured, friendly and talkative (as opposed to quiet and reserved)
Agreeableness: empathetic, altruistic, trusting and warm (as opposed to mistrustful, callous, uncooperative, stubborn and rude)
Neuroticism (which is sometimes given the alternative label ‘emotional stability’): worrying, self-conscious and temperamental (the opposite would be calm and emotionally stable)
Each person receives a low or high score in each category, and combined, these give an overall picture of their personality. You can try the test for yourself online.* This test is used widely by psychologists in a wide range of contexts, from developing new models for organisational management to trying to understand why we vote the way we do.
This might at first seem counter-intuitive, but when you think about it, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that our personality could have an effect on our political choices.
John Mayer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, sums this up very neatly: ‘Our votes are an expression not only of which candidates are best – the Republicans, Democrats, or those candidates of another party – but also of our own way of perceiving and thinking about the world and what is good or bad about it. Our personal perceptions and thoughts in this area (and others) have been shaped over time within our personalities.’15
What researchers have found is that – taking into account all the other factors such as class, race, geography and so on – there are a couple of striking differences in the personalities of people who are conservative or liberal. So much so, that if a person identifies as left or right wing we can make a reasonable guess about certain aspects of their personality.
The aspect in which liberals and conservatives differ the most is in their openness to new experiences. Not surprisingly, liberals rate themselves as higher on Openness than conservatives (this is true for both social and economic liberals).16 This means that they tend to respond more positively to change and uncertainty, which, in practice, might mean they are more likely to want to change what they perceive as social inequality, support minority rights and welfare, and be more tolerant of complexity.
After Openness, the second most reliable difference is in Conscientiousness, on which conservatives score more highly. This means they might be more diligent and careful (e.g. in appearance, or in their work), with greater respect for convention and tradition, perhaps being more likely to defend the status quo and support religious and traditional values. Meanwhile, liberals can be a little disrespectful towards established norms and conventions – for example, a recent analysis of the social media site Twitter found that liberals were more likely to swear.17
After Openness and Conscientiousness, the results become less clear, but in some studies there is a trend for Neuroticism to be higher among those on the left, and for Extraversion to be higher on the right.
In the USA there is now a fairly well-established link showing that if a person is a strong liberal or conservative voter, they’re likely to score more highly on either Openness or Conscientiousness, and researchers have found a similar trend in many other countries too. This was certainly the predominant pattern in a survey of the 2016 presidential election in the USA, which showed that, yes, those who scored highly on Openness were more likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, while those who scored highly on Conscientiousness were more likely to vote for Donald Trump. They also found that those with higher Neuroticism (low emotional stability) were more likely to vote for Clinton.18 That might be because people who score more highly on Neuroticism will value the safety net of social security, and would be more likely to vote for a party supporting that.
What all of this shows us is that personality and political choices are linked – and the relationship is probabilistic. It may be more likely that a person who is more open to new experiences will have liberal viewpoints, but they could always adopt a conservative political ideology. It simply means that if you have a certain political outlook, you are more likely to have certain personality traits, moral intuitions and cognitive biases.
So, based on personality profile, I can make a guess as to someone’s political leanings (and vice versa), and it’s likely that I’d be right more often than I’m wrong.
Political campaigners are already wise to the possibilities. As more sources of data become available, the curious correlation between how we vote and our personality and life choices is becoming more and more apparent in everything from the way we use Twitter, to the posts we like on Facebook, to the books we order on Amazon (astoundingly, even when it comes to books about science, liberals and conservatives in the USA prefer different books:19 liberals tend to go for general science such as physics and astronomy, while conservatives favour more specific subjects such as medicine or geophysics; in fact the only topic of equal interest to both is dinosaurs!). This has led to fears that the tell-tale signs left by our digital footprints are increasingly being used by political campaigns to target voters based on their personality profile, as we will see in Chapter 7.
If research shows that there are clear differences between voters on the left and right, how does this affect our present politics?
First, a couple of caveats:
Of course the picture we’ve painted of left and right wing is a simplification – in reality things are always more complex. Libertarians in the USA, for example, seem to have a different kind of ‘third’ psychological profile. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued that libertarians don’t fit into the moral profiles of either liberals or conservatives, emphasising, for example, the importance of individual liberty above all other moral concerns.20
So, if you don’t feel that the psychological profiles we’ve looked at here apply to you, that makes sense – there’s definitely more to it.
It also doesn’t mean that our political views are fixed. Our personality can change over our lifetime, and so too can our politics. People often say that we become more conservative as we age – ‘Any man who is under thirty, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over thirty, and is not a conservative, has no brains,’ as Winston Churchill supposedly said.
But while this does appear to have been true for the baby boomer generation, it isn’t necessarily true for all generations in all contexts.21 It does seem that as we get older the link between our genetics and our politics gets stronger.22 That could be because at a younger age our politics are more influenced by our upbringing, but as we get into our twenties we become freer to make our own choices in life, and so our genetic tendencies are more readily expressed. As we’ve seen, that doesn’t mean our genes literally determine our politics; rather, our genes might shape certain biases, and that in turn those biases increase the likelihood that we’ll take a particular political stance.
So life experiences are hugely important, of course, as are the policies offered by particular parties. In the 2017 election in the UK, age and home ownership were two huge predictors of how people voted. This almost certainly can’t be explained purely based on individual differences in people’s personality, given that the Labour Party explicitly targeted the vote of younger generations (both in terms of voter registration and policies like free university tuition) and offered support for those renting (with further regulations on private renting).
Nevertheless, some of the individual differences on the left and the right offer a good starting point for understanding why we might respond to and interpret events differently.
These days, the ideological basis for left- and right-wing politics might be increasingly unclear; nevertheless some of the psychological differences we’ve looked at might help us to understand how people are responding to changing circumstances. Le Pen’s formulation of a new divide between ‘patriots’ and ‘globalists’ actually follows quite logically from some of the main differences we have seen in the last two chapters. In the previous chapter, we saw how those on the right typically have a higher sense of in-group loyalty, which obviously accords with the ‘patriots’, those who feel comfortable putting their country first. In this chapter we have seen that cognitive flexibility and openness to new experiences is generally higher on the left, which again clearly accords with an openness to a changing globalised world. The left might therefore be psychologically inclined to be open to migrants from other cultures, and to changing relationships between countries, such as the increasing integration of the countries of the European Union.
These traits of in-group loyalty and openness to new experiences probably played a role in the recent UK referendum on membership of the EU. We know that British voters from across the political spectrum voted to leave the EU for a variety of reasons, but preliminary research suggests leave voters were, by and large, less open to new experiences, as measured by the Big Five.
If those on the right are less open to new experiences, we might not have predicted that predominantly right-wing voters would vote for the ‘change’ of leaving the European Union, thinking instead that the Remainers’ message of ‘Better Together’ might have held more sway. However, mass migration from the EU, and the EU’s right to impose laws on the UK meant that, for many voters, the EU was itself a source of change and instability. An enhanced sense of in-group loyalty also means that the importance of preserving ‘British culture’ is much more likely to appeal intuitively to those on the right than on the left. As we’ve seen, those on the right are more likely to be sensitive to potential threats, and this probably made them more sensitive to mass migrations. Maybe the fact that many on the left don’t intuitively understand the perceived threat (justified or not) of immigration contributed to right-wing voters feeling that their concerns about the issue were not being listened to. And perhaps it also accounts for the popular success of a Leave campaign that promised to ‘take back control’ of national borders.
Similar language was used by Le Pen during the recent presidential election, when she claimed that French ‘civilisation’ was under threat. ‘Give us France back, damn it!’ she demanded at a rally in Paris while her supporters chanted: ‘This is our home!’ Pledging to suspend even legal immigration, she took aim at France’s Muslim population: ‘In France, we drink wine whenever we want. In France we do not force women to wear the veil because they are impure . . . In France, we get to decide who deserves to become French.’
Even though she didn’t win, she still got a surprisingly large segment of the vote for a far-right party. With a greater understanding of the personality differences between voters, we can perhaps understand how her rhetoric about homeland, taking back borders, promising security and advocating nationalist economics as opposed to greater globalisation would appeal to conservatives, with their higher sensitivity to threats, their inclination toward in-group loyalty and their desire for stability.
We can see the same trends in politicians’ speeches appealing to voters on the left. Democrat Barack Obama referred to his political platform as ‘rejecting fear’, and asked voters to ‘choose hope’. Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the Labour Party in the UK, has often characterised his political agenda as one of hope, in contrast to the agenda of ‘fear’ advocated by his Conservative opponent Theresa May. Both men seem to be quite explicitly rejecting some of the psychological biases associated with the opposite side of the political spectrum.
Liberal commentators are frequently frustrated by sections of the electorate voting for a party or candidate that would appear to be against the voters’ own interests (for example, working-class voters supporting a party that advocates lower taxes for the rich). American political psychologist John Jost suggests that what those on the left fail to understand is that voters on the right are not simply concerned about economic benefits; rather, some may be voting for policies that fulfil a broader cognitive need for continuity, order and a sense of national identity. Jost’s view might also help to explain why countries tend to shift to the right in times of perceived threat. For example, after a terrorist attack, the heightened sense of anxiety seems to make ideas of in-group loyalty and national stability more important to many voters.
If we do vote, at least in part, according to our psychological needs, then it makes sense to find out more about what those needs, biases and impulses are and how they shape the way we view the world. That way we can form a better understanding of how we might respond as our political environment changes.
I’ve focused on the left–right axis here partly because we have so much interesting evidence for how it can help us to view our differences. Probably, over time, the study of political psychology will change, and we will develop different axes that describe us better (and there are lots of other ways academics have done that in the past, many of which have merit). But, for now, left and right are still a useful starting point for looking at political cultures.
Psychology can’t tell us if a bias is right or wrong, but it might help us to understand why people hold particular views, sometimes so different to our own. That doesn’t mean we all have to agree, but we can at least have a little more appreciation of each other’s perspective – and perhaps a little more harmony around the dinner table at the next family gathering.
* For example, at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometric Centre: discovermyprofile.com/tag/Personality
