Can a fridge reveal your politics?

If you looked inside a stranger's fridge, do you think you could guess their political orientation from its contents?

Last month — fed up no doubt with increasingly wild speculation about the U.S. presidential election — John Keefe and his colleagues at The New York Times asked a representative sample of U.S. residents to send in a photo of the contents of their fridge, and to state whether they planned to vote for Donald Trump or Joe Biden.

Readers were asked to guess which were Trump fridges and which were Biden fridges. Of more than 22 million guesses, readers were correct 52 per cent of the time. In other words, they were only marginally more accurate than if they'd based their guess on the flip of a coin.

Perhaps it's not surprising that fridges don't say much about our politics. But are there other ways to discover political orientation?

Still on a frivolous note, Omri Gillath at the University of Kansas asked 208 adults to photograph their shoes, supply their age, gender, income and political ideology, and fill out a personality inventory. The researchers coded the shoes on a number of factors, for example whether they had rounded or pointy toes or whether they were in good or poor repair. They asked 63 undergraduates to look at the photographs and guess the political ideology of the owner as well as their demographic characteristics and personality.

They guessed political ideology with significant accuracy. It turns out people with more liberal views usually wore less attractive, round-toed, cheap, poorly repaired shoes; while the more conservative wore shoes rated as attractive, pointy-toed, expensive and properly repaired. If we consider the results of the volunteers' personality tests, this finding isn't as random as it first appears.

Conservative-leaning individuals scored higher on conscientiousness, one of the “Big Five” personality traits. Highly conscientious people are more organized and responsible, and more likely to attend to detail (like keeping shoes repaired).

The highly conscientious also expect to assume responsibility for their own behaviours, which Eugene Chan at Monash University suggested could be why he found those with more conservative views enjoy better health and longevity.

Alan Gerber at Yale and, more recently, Matthias Fatke at Ludwig Maximilian University Munich looked at correlations between the Big Five factors and political ideology. While associations were inconclusive or weak for three characteristics — neuroticism, agreeableness, and particularly extroversion — there was a consistent association between conscientiousness and a conservative ideology, and openness to new experience and a more liberal outlook. The take-away? If you don't want others to know your political views, be guarded when topics about personal responsibility or openness to new experiences are introduced. Pay attention, too, to the shoes you wear.

But don't worry about what's in your fridge.