Liberals vs conservatives

Study finds their thinking is as different as chalk and cheese.

Political liberals and conservatives think, categorise and perceive quite differently, according to a 2015 University of Virginia study, in which conservatives behaved more like East Asians. “We found in our study that liberals and conservatives think as if they were from completely different cultures – almost as different as East and West,” the leader of the cultural psychology study, Thomas Talhelm, says in a university paper.

Political conservatives in the US tend to be intuitive or “holistic” thinkers, he says, and East Asians are especially likely to be this way, whereas Westerners generally and US liberals especially tend to be more analytical thinkers.

“On psychological tests, Westerners tend to view scenes, explain behaviour and categorise objects analytically,” Talhelm says. “But the vast majority of people around the world – about 85% – more often think intuitively – what psychologists call holistic thought, and we found that’s how conservative Americans tend to think.”

The people who took part in the study, published in Personality and Psychology Bulletin, were mainly US university students and adults who participated online.

One of the tests was to say which two of three objects were more closely related – for example, a mitten, a scarf and a hand; or a panda, a banana and a monkey. Liberals tended to match the items that belonged in the same abstract category (mitten and scarf; panda and monkey), whereas conservatives tended to match items that were functionally related (mitten and hand; banana and monkey).

Talhelm, now a professor of behaviour and science at the University of Chicago, says that in Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic societies, analytically thinking liberals are “extreme”, because they tend to think differently from most of the rest of the world, including holistic-thinking conservatives.

In the West, he says, liberals tend to live in urban and suburban areas with relatively weak social and community ties, to move more often and to be less religious. This makes them more individualistic than conservatives and very different from people living in Eastern cultures. And conservatives tend to be more connected to their community, to be more religious, and to move less often – and possibly live in the same area all their life – which helps them maintain strong social and familial bonds and commitments.

But are conservatives really the collectivists that this research suggests? Aren’t liberals, who tend to favour more support for the needy, the real collectivists? Talhelm told Scientific American that true collectivism “doesn’t mean general sharing with other people. It’s about social ties and responsibilities to those within your group.” Anti-poverty programmes, he says, actually align with Western societies’ focus on individuality, because rather than strengthening groups, they usually help individuals to do better.