A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science has concluded there is an apparent link between political ideology and how much self control a person has, and that this explains things like dieting. In essence, the research implies that conservative-minded people, should they wish to diet, will succeed more often than liberal minded people.
The research was conducted at University of California at Santa Barbara, and the paper, which unfortunately is not open access (meaning that you have to pay $10 for two days’ access), is titled “The self-control consequences of political ideology.”
Not being willing to pay for the paper means that this reporter is at a slight disadvantage, reliant upon the abstract and what others in the media (who may or may not have read the original research) have to say.
In a nutshell, the abstract states: “greater endorsement of political conservatism (versus liberalism) was associated with greater attention regulation and task persistence.” There is also a comment about free-will, which doesn’t make much sense outside the context of the core paper.
This is expanded in a research note, which runs: “‘When marketers consider self-control, we tend to think of sticking to a diet or exercise regimen, not wandering off your grocery list or avoiding impulsive purchases. All of these behaviors exhibit elements of attention regulation and persistence. Ultimately, however, it all comes down to believing whether or not you can control your own behavior, and what we’re finding is that conservatives are more likely to believe they can control their own behavior.”
So, conservatives have a greater belief in ‘free-will’. That’s likely to be controversial. How was this conclusion reached?
For the study, the researchers divided people into different groups based on their political philosophy, which boiled down to: those who “endorse traditional values and the status quo.” These people, misleadingly dubbed conservatives, displayed greater levels of self control compared with those who endorsed “egalitarian ideals and progressive change,” who have been described as liberals.
The first issue that arises are the tags “conservative” and “liberal.” Here labels more commonly applied with the U.S. are used, making international interpretation of the research somewhat difficult. With “liberal” in the U.S., this is often taken to be a left-of-center position; in Australia it means right-wing (what many in the U.S. might call conservative). In the U.K., liberal is synonymous with a center-ground political position, leaning towards right wing liberal economics and left-wing liberal social policy. To complicate matters further, Margaret Thatcher, champion to many conservatives around the world, was not a true conservative but a proponent of neo-liberalism, following the teaching of liberal economists. Here liberal refers to a belief in unregulated free markets.
To add to this, Psychological Science ran a study which found political self-images are often flawed. Here, some political parties overestimated their uniqueness, whilst others overestimated their group’s internal consensus. This paper, issued in 2013, was called “The Liberal Illusion of Uniqueness.” The titled throws up the same issues, but we’ll leave those for now.
Another study, from the Sociological Spectrum: Mid-South Sociological Association, dismisses the whole political ideology-personality leaning as a fallacy. Looking at anti-social behavior, this study concluded: “the relationship between political ideology and misbehavior appears to be partly spurious and partly indirectly attributable to the effects of other social and situational factors.”
So, we see that political labels merely obfuscate things. This is also due to the simplistic way of seeing politics as a simple spectrum running from left-to-right, whereas a four-way matrix is a better model, allowing for such positions as left-wing libertarianism, left-wing authoritarianism, right-wing free marketers, and right-wing aristocracy (and far more, as shown in models like the political compass.)
So, that’s my first issue: political philosophy isn’t that simple. My second point is with determinism. If political beliefs can change, then such research infers personality traits also must change. Is this so? There are plenty of arguments either way about personality being fixed (or shaped during childhood) or whether it is something, as Jean-Paul Sarte and other existentialists might argue, down to free will and subject to change at any point in life as the person so choose.
My third point is the way that the research was conducted. The researchers used a Stroop test. Here subjects were asked to distinguish a physical color from its word association. Those who picked the apparent correct answer were considered to have a better level of “self regulation.” How exactly was the correct answer defined?
The Stroop effect is a demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task. It is commonly used to assess psychiatric and neurological disorders. Although widely used the test is not accepted by all psychologists, or at least in its interpretation, and there are clear limits as to how far inferences can be taken.
I’m not questioning the motivations of the researchers. However, the way that parts of the media have run with this story has been to take a small study, based on ill-defined political views, and portray those of a right-wing persuasion as stoic, rational and able to exercise better self-control. Such sweeping generalizations do no one any good.
