Political Orientation, Thrill-Seeking, and Happiness

Political orientation is strongly linked to temperament, say psychologists. Conservatives (with a capital “C”) are largely conservative (with a small “c”); likewise Liberals tend to be liberal. The former value stability, tradition, and family—in their personal as well as political lives. The latter value progress, novelty and autonomy. Of course, the actual positions advanced by the two political parties in America drift over time. But it's instructive to think about why a particular personality type might lean in a certain political direction. It's also an exercise that fosters empathy.

In 2008, a team of psychology researchers published a study establishing "a positive correlation between disgust sensitivity and self-reported conservatism." The link may explain conservative attitudes on "purity-related" political issues such as "abortion and gay marriage," its authors say. As Jonathan Haidt explains in The Righteous Mind, an “ancient food processing center” in our brains helps us detect spoiled meat and other impure things. In one of his lectures, Jordan Peterson lists “sexual contact” among the disease-causing contaminants it recognizes. So it's easy to see how disgust informs a “behavioral immune system” that can affect moral judgments alongside health-related ones.

I've long been aware of the link between disgust and conservatism. What comes as a surprise is a related discovery made by Peterson and one of his students. “We found that conservatives are not only more aroused by disgusting stimuli,” he says in the lecture linked above, but by “any stimuli: happiness, hunger, fear, you name it.” Each of these “affects the conservative more than the liberal.”

Now that's interesting. That seems foundational.

It's likely that the enduring war between liberals and conservatives is not down to incidentals—like our differing appetites for international travel—but to one or two basic, irreconcilable differences in values, if only we could pinpoint them. Attempts have been made. Long ago—pre-internet, so I've lost the source—someone described conservatives' highest value as “children” and liberals' as “personal autonomy.” This goes a long way toward explaining the divide on abortion, homosexuality, single motherhood, and more. Similarly, it's been proposed that conservatives place “life” above all else, while liberals favor “quality of life.”

Fine-tuning these basic differences helps us find common ground and work toward satisfactory political goals, even if the reasons behind the differences have remained elusive. Peterson's finding—that conservatives are simply more sensitive to everything, goes deeper even than our basic value sytem. It goes to the level of our physical makeup.

Liberals' propensity for novelty-seeking is a given, explaining that thirst for travel as well our affinity for bitter craft beers and alternative sexual lifestyles. But what if we novelty-seek because we need more stimuli to feel something? Perhaps the differences between conservatives and liberals come down to a simple physiological response, a difference in the sensitivity of our taste buds, our sight, our hearing, our sense of touch—or at the very least, in the brain's processing of these.

Differing responses to stimuli could even explain the fact that conservatives are happier than liberals, an effect that’s ben attributed to the stable and connected social institutions enjoyed by the former, such as marriage and faith communities. But a Buddhist tradition defines happiness as the ability to access joy “without grasping.” For conservatives, perhaps, a joyful moment is simply experienced more strongly.

Why wouldn't conservatives' sensitivity to bad emotions, you might ask, balance out their sensitivity to good ones? Because, evidence suggests, the avoidance of pain does not lie along the same spectrum as the acquisition of pleasure.

That's really the crisis of modernity in a nutshell: we're temperature-controlled and satiated, we can avoid hard labor, we can access a wealth of knowledge and art with a click. Why, then, are we unhappy? Because we need to feel, not to reduce occasions to feel.