People often say that if you want to get along well with others, you should avoid discussing religion and politics. They say that when you’re meeting your new boss, or your new neighbours, or your future in-laws, it’s better not to start declaring all your opinions about religious and political matters. You’re bound to differ with them on some questions, and those disagreements could lead to a lot of ill feeling.
That is probably good advice. Many people take political and religious questions very seriously. Even when people don’t have any personal stake in an issue, they can still have passionate opinions about it. By contrast, people are much less impassioned about factual matters that don’t have any obvious political or religious implications. For example, it took more than 30 years for Richard Dawkins’s seminal science book, The Selfish Gene, to sell a million copies, whereas it took only two years for the same author’s anti-religious book, The God Delusion, to reach the million mark. Likewise, the American linguistic scholar Noam Chomsky is far more famous for his criticisms of US foreign policy than for his groundbreaking scientific work on language acquisition.
Why do so many of us care so much about political and religious matters? The most likely answer is that political and religious attitudes reflect our basic values—our ideas about how to live and how to relate to other people and to the world. Because these values are so central to our sense of who we are, it’s satisfying when people agree with our attitudes, and it’s disconcerting when they don’t.1 When people choose partners of any kind, they gravitate toward those who share their political and religious attitudes. For example, as we mentioned at the beginning of the previous chapter, spouses tend to be very similar, on average, in their political and religious views.
In the previous chapter, we explained how the major factors of personality—particularly H and O—underlie the two main trade-offs in people’s value systems. In this chapter, we discuss the role of personality in shaping our political attitudes.
Researchers who study political attitudes have found that people’s attitudes can be predicted very well by just two variables. Those variables are called Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). Both are assessed by self-report scales. To give you an idea of what these scales measure, we’ve listed some of the items on each scale in Table 7-1.
First let’s consider RWA, which was developed by Bob Altemeyer.2 People who have high levels of RWA show three related tendencies: they conform to conventional norms, they obey the established authorities, and they support aggression by those authorities against people who don’t conform or who don’t obey. In short, high RWA people tend to disapprove of people and ideas that challenge the accepted beliefs and structure of society. In the 16th century they would have disliked the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. In the 19th century they would have disliked Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (come to think of it, many of them still do). High-RWA people in North America today have a predictable pattern of views on political issues: many of them oppose the legalization of (among other things) abortion and doctor-assisted suicide as well as same-sex marriage and recreational drugs.
TABLE 7–1 Example Items from the Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation Scales
Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA)
Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else. (R)
The only way our country can get through the crisis ahead is to get back to our traditional values, put some tough leaders in power, and silence the troublemakers spreading bad ideas.
The facts on crime, sexual immorality, and the recent public disorders all show that we have to crack down harder on deviant groups and troublemakers if we are going to save our moral standards and preserve law and order.
The established authorities generally turn out to be right about things, while the radicals and protestors are usually just “loudmouths” showing off their ignorance.
Our country needs free thinkers who have the courage to defy traditional ways, even if this upsets many people. (R)
Social Dominance Orientation (SDO)
Some groups of people are simply inferior to others.
To get ahead in life, it is sometimes necessary to step on other groups.
Sometimes other groups must be kept in their place.
We should do what we can to equalize conditions for different groups. (R)
All groups should be given an equal chance in life. (R)
Note: “R” indicates a reverse-keyed statement, meaning that disagreement contributes to higher scores on the scale. RWA items from Altemeyer (1981, 1996); SDO items from Pratto et al. (1994).
Next let’s consider SDO, which was developed by Felicia Pratto and Jim Sidanius.3 People who are high in SDO generally want some groups of people (presumably their own) to have higher status and greater wealth and power than other groups. In other words, they prefer hierarchy to equality, both within and between societies. In the 19th century they would have opposed the abolition of serfdom or slavery (unless, of course, they themselves were serfs or slaves). In the early 20th century they would have opposed workplace safety laws. High-SDO people in North America today generally oppose state-run social welfare systems as well as public funding for health care and for higher education, and they generally oppose assistance for foreign countries and for other ethnic groups.
RWA and SDO aren’t strongly related to each other, but both are strongly related to political orientation. When people are asked to place themselves on a scale from “left wing” to “right wing,” or from “liberal” to “conservative,” left-wing or liberal people are likely to score low in both RWA and SDO, and the right-wing or conservative people are likely to score high in both.4 It’s not surprising that the RWA scale predicts how right-wing someone is, but the SDO scale predicts this almost as strongly. For example, one large-scale study of US citizens found that people’s self-placement on a scale from “liberal” to “conservative” correlated over .50 with RWA and about .40 with SDO. Again, what makes this finding especially interesting is that RWA and SDO are not so strongly related to each other—in this particular study, the correlation was a little more than .30.5
We realize that the above results place politically conservative persons in a somewhat unfavourable light. But we should note that some people who hold conservative views are not particularly high in RWA or in SDO. Moreover, some of the correlates of political conservatism are more desirable: conservatives tend to be slightly happier than liberals and to be slightly more satisfied with life; they also tend to have a somewhat greater sense of personal control and personal responsibility.6
Besides being related to people’s general political orientations, RWA and SDO predict a variety of more specific attitudes.7 For example, both are associated with blind patriotism (“My country right or wrong!”) and with support for the war. (Which war? The current one.) Note, however, that RWA and SDO are associated with different reasons for supporting wars: high-RWA persons see the world as a dangerous place in which enemies threaten the values and safety of one’s people, whereas high-SDO persons see the world as a competitive place in which enemies must be defeated for the sake of the status, power, and wealth of one’s people.
In addition, RWA and SDO are both associated with dislike of minority ethnic groups, of gays and lesbians, and of women’s rights. The combination of RWA and SDO can predict those attitudes very well—considerably better than either variable on its own.8 Altemeyer has put it this way: if there were a Prejudice Olympics, the gold medal would go to people who are high in both RWA and SDO (the “double highs,” as he calls them), and people high in SDO only or high in RWA only would win the silver and bronze, respectively. People low in both would finish out of the medals, but we think they’d be happy just to have met so many wonderful people from all over the world.
How do RWA and SDO relate to the major dimensions of personality? First, as you’d probably expect, RWA is related to low levels of the O factor. This means that people who are more socially conservative—who favour the conventional social structure and conventional norms—tend to be lower in O. As we explained in Chapter 3, high-O people don’t mind things that are new and unusual, so they’re more likely to try eating strange foods or visiting faraway countries or using new technologies. And high-O people especially like new and unusual ideas—perhaps too much, in some cases—so they aren’t strongly tied to conventional notions of how society should be structured.
The link between the O factor and low RWA is moderately strong, but it’s far from perfect. You can probably think of some low-O people who don’t have socially conservative views and some high-O people who do. (You could probably find some of the latter in the Vatican and some of the former in Las Vegas.) And even though people with higher levels of O have a predisposition to favour social change, there are many other variables that can influence one’s political perspective. For example, a high-O person who visits some extremely chaotic country might conclude that traditional values are needed to maintain a functioning society even though his or her personal taste is for greater individual freedom. Nevertheless, the point is that lower levels of O usually go along with higher levels of social conservatism.
One interesting twist on this trend is that the link between O and political attitudes gets stronger as people get older. Among people in their late teens and twenties, lower O is only weakly related to social conservatism. Among middle-aged people, this link is much stronger. It’s as if one’s level of O exerts a stronger influence on one’s political thinking as one gets older: low-O people gravitate toward socially conservative positions, and high-O people drift away from those positions.
In one of our research projects,9 we studied personality and political attitudes in three countries: Canada, South Korea, and the United States. Our hypothesis was that in all three countries, RWA should be more strongly related to O than to any of the other personality factors. The results supported this hypothesis, but the links between RWA and O weren’t the same across the three countries. In our Korean and Canadian samples, the correlation between O and RWA was modest (about –.20); in the US sample, the correlation was much stronger (about –.50). This was a pretty big difference, and it’s all the more striking given that it can’t be explained by cultural differences—the USA is culturally much more similar to Canada than to Korea.
But there was an important difference between our US participants and our participants from Canada and Korea: the US participants were much older. All of them were middle-aged adults, most of them university graduates, and their average age was over 50. By contrast, our Canadian and Korean participants were university students whose average age was around 20. So, the difference between the US results and the Korean and Canadian results suggests that as people get older, their levels of O have stronger effects on their social conservatism.
Why would the link between low O and RWA become stronger after young adulthood? We can get some hints from research in behaviour genetics, which examines how the differences between people can be explained by their different genes and their different environments (see Box 3–3). According to this research, differences among adolescents or young adults in political and religious views are due in large part to differences among the households in which they were raised.10 In other words, parents’ attitudes have a big influence on the level of social conservatism of their adolescent and young adult children.
After young adulthood, however, the influence of parents’ attitudes becomes weaker and genetic influences become stronger. Apparently, what happens is that from young adulthood on, people’s religious and political views become less strongly influenced by those of the parents who raised them. Instead, adults gradually develop attitudes that are more consistent with their personality characteristics—characteristics that have a genetic basis. In the case of socially conservative views, this largely means that the O factor exerts a stronger effect after young adulthood. Consider an 18-year-old who shares the socially conservative views of his or her parents. If that 18-year-old is high in O, he or she is likely to become lower in RWA during later adulthood; if low in O, he or she will probably maintain the parents’ conservative views.
The link between RWA and low O explains some interesting facts that you’ve probably already noticed in everyday life. One such fact is that academics and artists tend to be left-wing in their political orientation. Consider academics—specifically, university professors. One large survey found that 44% of US university professors described themselves as liberal and only 9% as conservative (the other 47% were “moderate”). In contrast, a large survey of the general US public found that only 22% were liberals, whereas 35% were conservatives (with the other 43% moderates).11
How does the O factor explain the left-wing political views of professors? People high in O tend to be intellectually curious, and such curiosity is perhaps the defining trait of the typical professor. At the same time, as we saw above, high O underlies socially liberal attitudes, including rejection of traditional religiosity. Thus, it’s not surprising that professors would be politically liberal.
One way to view the role of O is by examining differences between academic disciplines regarding how left-wing their professors are. First of all, the most left-wing disciplines are generally those within the humanities and social sciences, such as sociology, English literature, and philosophy.12 People who are interested in these areas of knowledge tend to be very high in O.13 Also, within any given area of knowledge, the more left-wing professors are usually found in the more theoretical or pure disciplines, and the more right-wing professors in the more practical or applied disciplines. For example, professors in economics are more liberal than those in banking and finance, professors in physics are more liberal than those in engineering, and professors in biology are more liberal than those in medicine. In these cases, it’s likely that high levels of O have attracted some persons to the theoretical disciplines and that those same high levels of O also favour a left-wing political orientation.
Like professors, artists tend to be very left-wing in their political orientation. (And among professors, those who teach in the fine or performing arts are among the most left-wing, rivalling even the sociologists.)14 As with professors, the left-wing tendencies of artists can be understood in terms of the O factor. Artists tend to be very high in the traits that define O—such as aesthetic appreciation, creativity, curiosity, and unconventionality—and these same traits are together related to socially liberal attitudes and to the rejection of traditional religiosity. Of course, some low-O people have some talent for painting or sculpting or for playing a musical instrument. But being an artist—creating a work of art for the sake of evoking emotions and ideas—is inherently a high-O endeavour. For this reason, highly original works of art rarely emphasize conservative values. And most famous artists—from Pablo Picasso to Charlie Chaplin—have been left-wing in their political views.
The O factor also explains some other characteristics of left-wing and right-wing people. For example, one group of researchers wondered whether people’s political views could be inferred from the kinds of possessions they kept in their living spaces.15 The researchers went to a university dormitory and, with the students’ permission, carefully inspected the students’ rooms, counting various kinds of objects. When the researchers examined the rooms, they didn’t yet know the political views of the students. But they asked those students in a separate survey to place themselves on a scale running from liberal to conservative. (This study was done in the United States, so “liberal” and “conservative” mean left-wing and right-wing.)
The researchers found that the more liberal students’ rooms had more books and music CDs—as well as a wider variety of books and music CDs—than did the more conservative students’ rooms. The liberal students also had more movie tickets and travel tickets. Notice that the everyday possessions in liberal students’ rooms suggest wide intellectual and artistic interests—expressions of high O. By contrast, the more conservative students’ rooms had more flags (especially US flags) and more sports-related decor than did the more liberal students’ rooms, which suggested a more conventional orientation. The conservative students also had more event calendars, postage stamps, string and thread, and ironing boards and irons—possessions suggesting orderliness and planning ahead. This latter result is consistent with other findings of a modest link between the C factor and political orientation, which we’ll discuss later on.
BOX 7–1 Political Orientation, Sexual Orientation, and the O Factor
Political orientation is related to sexual orientation. For example, in the 2008 US elections, 80% of gay, lesbian, or bisexual voters supported Democratic Party candidates for the House of Representatives; only 19% supported Republican Party candidates. The corresponding numbers for heterosexual voters were 53% and 44%.16 One likely reason for this pattern is that the Democrats are viewed as much more supportive of gay and lesbian rights than are the Republicans. But even in the absence of these important policy differences, it’s likely that most gay and lesbian voters would still favour left-wing over right-wing parties. On average, gay men and lesbians have higher levels of the O factor than do heterosexual men and women.17 The difference isn’t huge, and even among persons very high in O, the large majority are heterosexual. Still, gay men and lesbians are overrepresented among high-O persons, especially among people in the arts.18 Because higher levels of the O factor are strongly associated with preferences for the political left, most gay and lesbian voters would favour left-wing parties even when matters of sexual orientation are not among the election issues.
Now let’s turn from RWA to SDO, the other major political attitude variable. As you’ll recall, high-SDO people favour a hierarchical society in which some groups dominate other groups. The links between SDO and personality are also close to what you’d expect: SDO relates mainly to the low levels of the H factor, meaning that high-H people generally oppose social hierarchies.19 The tendency for high-H people to be low in SDO makes sense in light of the traits that define the H factor, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. High-H people are straightforward and fair in their dealings with others, and they don’t want superior status and wealth and power. Therefore, they dislike the idea of stepping on other groups or of keeping other groups in their place.
By the way, even though the H factor is a pretty good predictor of egalitarian views, the link isn’t perfect, or even close to perfect. Some people who are low in H might adopt egalitarian attitudes if it’s in their interest to do so—in fact, being the high-profile leader of a left-wing political party might be an attractive prospect for a low-H person who holds no genuine commitment to the principle of social equality. And some people who are high in H (and low in SDO) might decide—rightly or wrongly—that too much economic equality or too much multiculturalism causes problems.
High-SDO people share with low-H people a willingness to make decisions that by most standards would be grossly unethical. For example, one study showed that high-SDO students, just like low-H people, reported that they’d be willing to make money by exporting dangerous products to a developing country20—a finding similar to that observed for low-H people (as we’ll discuss in Chapter 9). The same study also examined what happened when decisions were made by pairs of people in which one member of each pair was arbitrarily designated as the leader. The results showed that the pairs most likely to make unethical decisions were those that combined a high SDO leader with a high RWA follower—a combination that Altemeyer has called the “lethal union.” A country whose high-SDO leaders are supported by high-RWA citizens would be a prime candidate for starting aggressive wars—wars that the leaders would cynically justify as necessary for the security of the nation, simply as a way to rally the population.
We examined the link between H and SDO in the study we mentioned earlier, based on samples from Canada, Korea, and United States. In all three samples, low H was associated with high SDO. Now, you might recall that the link between low O and high RWA was stronger in the sample of middle-aged US adults than in the samples of Canadian and Korean university students. But in contrast, the correlation between low H and high SDO was similar across all three samples, averaging nearly –.40. It seems that people’s personalities—specifically, their levels of the H factor—influence their attitudes toward social inequality to about the same extent regardless of their age. Again, this wasn’t the case for personality in relation to social conservatism: low levels of O were related to social conservatism only modestly in young adults, but more strongly in middle-aged adults.
Why the difference? Apparently, the influence of parents’ attitudes on young people’s attitudes is weaker for issues of social inequality than for issues of social change. Researchers typically find that similarity between parents and their (young adult) children is much stronger for RWA than for SDO.21 If you’re a parent, you may have some important influence on your children’s attitudes toward traditional or modern values, but you probably have much less influence on your children’s attitudes about hierarchy or equality in society.
BOX 7–2 Personality and Politics: It Depends on the Context
All of the findings we’ve described this chapter have been based on people who belong to mainstream or majority groups in modern societies. But these findings don’t necessarily apply when we consider other groups or other kinds of societies.
First, consider low-H people who happen to belong to a disadvantaged minority group. Those people might claim to be ardent egalitarians, denouncing the inequalities of their society. But this egalitarianism would simply be a cynical reflection of their own personal interest in improving their low social status. Such people would still favour hierarchies within their own group, as long as those hierarchies put them at the top. (Low-H people from low-status groups might sometimes favour social hierarchies for the society as a whole, in cases when it’s possible for them—individually or as a group—to move into positions of higher status.) Likewise, consider low-O people who happen to belong to a minority group that is alienated from mainstream society. Those people might well become rebels and dissidents, trying to undermine the authorities and conventions of the mainstream group. But they wouldn’t approve of such dissent within their own group; instead, they would expect the members of their group to obey its rules and leaders.
Now consider a different kind of society—specifically, a communist society of the kind that dominated much of the world during the second half of the 20th century. The official ideology of communist countries emphasizes economic and racial equality, so the low-H people of those societies probably wouldn’t openly favour a hierarchy based on social class or on ethnicity. But those people would still pursue status and wealth within the communist system, and they would likely favour an aggressive foreign policy aimed at dominating other countries. Also, because communist societies discourage organized religion, the low-O citizens of those countries wouldn’t be exposed to traditional religious teachings. But those people would still support the conventional norms of morality within their society, and their obedience would be directed toward the Communist Party and its dogma.22
We mentioned above that you can predict people’s attitudes on many social and political issues by knowing their levels of RWA and SDO. People who are high in both SDO and RWA are the most right-wing (or conservative), and people who are low in both SDO and RWA are the most left-wing (or liberal). (People who are high in one and low in the other tend to be in the middle overall, even though they have quite different combinations of left-wing and right-wing views.) So, does this mean that the supporters of different political parties are different in personality? Given that SDO is related to low H, and given that RWA is related to low O, you might expect supporters of left-wing parties to be higher in both H and O than supporters of right-wing parties. Is this true?
The answer differs a bit from one country to the next. In a study of Italian voters, Antonio Chirumbolo and Luigi Leone found that those who voted for right-wing parties were, on average, lower in H and lower in O than those who voted for left-wing parties—a result that follows the above logic exactly. Two other studies in Germany found very similar results.23 As expected, these differences were only modest in size. But some data from US voters—specifically, of middle-class, white, Anglo, mainly Christian residents of Oregon—gave somewhat different findings. The right-wing (Republican) voters did average lower in O than the left-wing (Democratic) voters. Also, the Republican voters averaged somewhat higher in C than did the Democratic voters.24 However, the Republicans and Democrats averaged about the same in H.
The lack of any link between H and political party preference in the US study is somewhat puzzling. If low H relates to SDO, and if SDO in turn relates to right-wing (Republican) support, then you’d expect Republicans, on average, to be somewhat low in H. So why don’t we find this? Why were the Republicans no less and no more honest and humble than the Democrats? Apparently, some mystery variable is balancing out what would otherwise be a tendency toward low H in Republicans, who tend to be high in SDO.
To understand what’s happening, consider the following sports analogy. Suppose that you have a really excellent vertical jump. Other things being equal, a better jumper should be a better volleyball player, so we’d expect you to be an above-average volleyball player. But if in fact you’re just an average volleyball player, then something else must be balancing out the effect of your jumping ability. For example, height also contributes to many aspects of volleyball performance, so if you’re much shorter than average, then perhaps this could be cancelling out the effect of your excellent vertical jump.
What is it, then, that balances out the effect of SDO so that Republicans aren’t any lower in H? We suspect that it’s religion. The more religious Americans tend to support the Republican Party, and on average, religious Americans are slightly above average in the H factor. If SDO and religiosity were both associated with being Republican, but if SDO and religiosity had opposite links with H, then Republicans would be no higher or lower in H than Democrats would be. And this is essentially what we find.
We’ve just revealed that high-H people are slightly more likely than low-H people to be religious. If this makes you wonder exactly how personality is related to religious and spiritual beliefs, stay tuned for our next chapter.