The first relevant personality trait among the Big Five is Openness to Experience, which characterizes people who like novelty for novelty’s sake, who are creative and unconventional, and who are curious about abstract discussions and art. People like that are predisposed to be liberals. This is actually intuitive to us; one of the stereotypes of a leftist in Brazil is someone who dresses like a hippie and who bores everyone by going on and on about hidden social problems behind apparently mundane things.
The ones who would enjoy the least such an activity are those low on Openness to Experience. It’s no wonder they tend to be politically conservative. They have no time for nonsense. In art, for example, they prefer realistic rather than abstract painting. They are those people who claim that “art’s dead” ever since Picasso or that you may find saying “That’s not art”. (Have you noticed how artists of any kind lean left?)
Rather than dressing like hippies, the people we’re talking about like the conventional look. While some people are filled with excitement when they explore radically new possibilities that could turn society upside down, those low on Openness to Experience step back in suspicion and cling to orthodoxy, to the tried-and-true.
In our comic, the sister is the sibling higher in Openness to Experience. She likes exploring new things and she feels stifled by the school environment and all its rules. I can bet she would be a fan of The Dead Poet’s Society. On the other hand, the brother, who doesn’t share her obsession with novelty, doesn’t mind staying within the limits set by society.
The second personality trait that correlates with ideology is Conscientiousness. People strong in this have a higher life expectancy, probably because they keep a tight rein on themselves and refrain from temptations such as not exercising, smoking or using drugs. They tend to be punctual, to keep their environments clean and organized, and, rather than procrastinating, to complete assignments right away so they can get the good feeling that comes with knowing that you’re done. They don’t like to leave things unfinished: they have a need for closure. In other words, they like definite answers, they don’t like uncertainty, and, because of that, they don’t really like considering alternative ideas (because it’s a fact of cognition that, the more points of view you hear, the less confident you feel in your final answer).
Now tell me: do you think a person like that would like to sit down in a circle in a dirty old room in the FAFICH [the acronym for the Federal University of Minas Gerais’s Philosophy and Humanities College] to debate the establishment? I don’t think so. Discussions like that never end with solutions for the problems that are brought up; all the fun is based on raising questions and leaving them floating in the air, like a heady smoke that elates the debaters as their brains are stimulated. Finding a solution is not the point. No chance to feel closure there.
When you think of it like that, it’s easy to understand why American conservatives support judicial restraint and a literal interpretation of the Constitution according to the unchanging meaning the words had at the time they were written. Those conservatives are dismayed at the prospect of having a bunch of philosopher-kings for judges, ignoring the letter of the law to decide according to whatever they say is its “spirit”. If you accept this manner of thinking, the interpretation can be this way today and the total opposite tomorrow. There’s no reliability, no legal certainty. Besides, the judge who acts like that is usurping the constitutional role of the lawmaker, and doing what you’re supposed to do is more important than tending to momentary interests. You can just feel the Conscientiousness in these words. The very name of this thesis is “judicial restraint”. What goes better with Conscientiousness than the word “restraint”?
People low in Conscientiousness are more lax with rules, less punctual and more procrastinating. Rather than feeling relieved when making definite decisions, they’re more likely to feel bad about not being able to keep options open. Flexibility before decisiveness. This sounds a lot like the “Prospective” character trait in the Myers-Briggs Typology, and indeed it has a strong negative correlation with Conscientiousness.
Visually, low Conscientiousness is embodied in the tilelê, as some people are labeled in Brazil (a concept akin to hippie). His look is calculated to suggest neglect with body care, hence the mandatory beard and the occasional long hair.
The simplest way to explain the relationship between Conscientiousness and conservatism is with a quote by psychologist Jeffery Mondak: “Individuals with high levels of conscientiousness demand a great deal of themselves, but they also impose high standards on other people.” Having a conservative morality means exactly that.
The relationship between low Conscientiousness and liberalism is even more understandable. People who don’t discipline themselves will inevitably be more frequent targets of external punishment and, as a result, may feel social norms as more of a heavy burden. It’s only natural that such people would rebel against those norms by adopting a liberal morality; that’s exactly what happened to the girl in the story.
Last, but not least, psychology has discovered that conservatism correlates with a heightened negativity bias. That is what we call the universal tendency of paying more attention to the negative stimuli in the environment than to the positive stimuli. It’s a trait that is easily understandable through the prism of natural selection: one who pays more attention to the risks in the environment has greater odds of surviving.
Although everyone has this innate bias, several experiments have demonstrated that conservatives have it to a greater degree than do liberals. When shown a happy photo and a repulsive one, conservatives spend far greater time looking at the second. When exposed to the photo of someone with an ambiguous facial expression, conservatives are more likely to see a threatening emotion, such as anger, while liberals are more likely to see a non-threatening emotion, such as surprise.
What does this have to do with politics? Everything. Many intellectuals say that one of the basic differences between right and left is that the left has an optimistic or utopian vision, that it believes in the perfectibility of mankind, and that it claims that man is born good but society corrupts him. Meanwhile, the right is characterized by a tragic vision. They’re disbelieving of the idea that the world could be much better than it currently is; they preach that man is born evil and, while society succeeds to a great extent in making him act good, his evilness is a constant threat to watch out for.
A good way of visualizing left and right is as two people tied together by a rope. One of them is proudly trying to pull the other to a better place without so much as looking back, a little annoyed because the other is a dead weight who insists to pull in the other direction. Meanwhile, the one in the back is appalled because he can see the first one pulling him toward a precipice. Which of these two people is the lunatic and which is the sane one is something that people can’t seem to agree on.
One wants to soften the punishment of criminals in order to relieve them of the needless punishment imposed by an authoritarian society. The other thinks this means greenlighting the way for highly dangerous people to do harm.
One wants affirmative action to help disadvantaged groups and institute a new and egalitarian society. The other is fearful of the social consequences of emphasizing race and gender rather than being blind to them. He also finds it dangerous to violate the principle of equal treatment, because this would undermine a pillar of civilization and would make society fall into a war for privileged treatment, making everyone worse off overall.
One wants to open the doors for Syrian immigrants to save them from their plight. The other gets goosebumps just imagining the large inflow of terrorists and rapists crossing the border, besides the social problems created by the formation of Islamic ghettos within the country.
One wants to centralize power in a revolutionary group, because that’s the only way of quelling the resistance of the reactionaries and implementing the changes we need for a better society. The other gets nightmares from imagining what those revolutionaries could do with all that power after having gotten it.
There is one question we haven’t made so far: why does this variation exist? One theory that exists in evolutionary psychology is that the variation exists because it is useful for the group’s success. It’s always good to have some people who are particularly sensitive to bear-shaped shadows in the bushes and stay back, while their more optimistic peers say it’s just a shadow and go into the bushes for berries. If everyone went straight for the berries, someday they would all get eaten together and the group would disappear. On the other hand, if they were all cowardly and stayed back, the group would lose many valuable opportunities to feed itself.
Just the same, it’s useful for our society to have one group who explores new possibilities, while the rest of society anchors itself in tradition. After all, you’ve got to have someone to preserve the acquisitions brought about by the radicals of the past. Without conservatives, perhaps the good innovations would start to appear old and uninteresting, be taken for granted, and subsequently lost in the liberals’ eagerness for novelty.
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