Friends of the Behavioral Economics Club, this week we present the paper “Tell me who you vote for, and I’ll tell you who you are? The associations of Political Orientation with Personality and Prosocial Behavior and the Plausibility of Evolutionary Approaches” by Grünhage, T. and Reuter, M. (2021) in which authors revise the existence of significant associations between political orientation, personality and prosocial behavior, to check if, the idea that political orientation and personality are influenced by each other, is supported.
Politics has become more important for the whole world these days. For instance, due to the pandemic or political transgressive and innovative programs that not everybody likes.
The differences between one and other parties are more evident each time, and this produces a polarization of them and of the people that give them their support.
That is why political psychology has been paying attention to this topic the last few months. This area of psychology studies political communication, intergroup-relations in and out the parties, but besides, it also dedicates its time and efforts to discover whether a person’s political orientation or “ideology” can be treated as a trait with potential explanatory power for his/her behavior in and outside the political sphere.
Studies focused on this idea are useful due to two reasons.
Former, because people’s political orientation could provide psychologists with hints to the person’s personality structure and behavioral inclinations.
Latter, this would be a way of enhance the comprehensibility of political phenomena, ranging from voting intentions to ideological consistency of individuals.
Negative associations between conservative political orientations and Big Five traits Openness and Agreeableness have been existing so far. As well as a positive relationship between being conservative and Conscientiousness.
Following this model (Big Five), Agreeableness would predict support for social justice causes and redistributive policies predominantly. The same would happen with measures focused on promoting culture. All of this would be related to liberal political orientation.
In a cited study in this paper, it is explained how authors showed after an experiment that the associations between certain personality traits and political orientations are only valid among politically engaged individuals.
And, moreover, there would be a higher level of compromise between people that tend to have a more conservative ideology.
As a resume, research so far indicates that the Big Five model is a good tool to analyze political orientation and its relationship with personality.
However, it must be mentioned that more studies should be done in order to delve into these aspects, because the fact that basic personality traits and political ideology have a relationship is a reality.
Regarding the relationship between political ideology and prosocial behavior, in mentioned studies in this paper, interesting information was found. For instance, and as the common sense says to us, a tendency to get along with people that have our same ideology is observed.
On the other hand, it was shown that people with competitive or individualist social value orientations are politically more conservative than people endorsing a prosocial orientation.
Other interesting data is that higher assertiveness and dominance is observed in people with conservative ideologies. Moreover, they would be less compassionate.
On the contrary, liberal people would be associated with higher cooperation between them and with others; besides, they would be kinder than conservatives.
In a nutshell, revised literature in this article suggests that people defined and thoroughly assessed right vs. left or conservative vs. liberal policies, do differ in their psychological profiles with respect to personality and interpersonal behavioral dispositions.
Presumably, this is because a proper definition of conservative and liberal implicates a series of very rooted differences inside the groups, that end affecting individual’s personalities.
Knowing the peculiarities of conservatives and liberals has significant relevance in the actual political realm. This would enhance traceability of political decisions.
Plus, it may prove fruitful in the qualification of theories of political science, such as extremism, populism, or even terrorism, bearing in mind that psychological peculiarities associated to an ideology are also related to the individual.
As usual, authors mention the need of delve into this topic, because it is a promising field that could apply its findings in numerous areas, not just politics.
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