'via Blog this'
- the well-educated are a little more liberal, the high-income are slightly more conservative
- For social liberalism, they once again find that it is associated with higher Openness and lower Conscientiousness
- Economic liberals are less Extroverted, more Agreeable, less Conscientious, less Stable (i.e. more Neurotic), and more Open. Or if you flip the perspective, free-marketeers are more Extroverted, less Agreeable, more Conscientious, more Stable, and less Open.
- distinction between social and economic ideology is very robust:
- STRANEZZE more educated people are more economically conservative. More educated people do much better on tests of political knowledge, and as Scott Althaus shows in his exhaustive literature review, high political knowledge predicts greater economic conservatism. But Gerber et al find no connection between education and economic conservatism
- STRANEZZE. Openness is the one Big 5 personality trait that is clearly correlated with IQ: smart people are more Open. In my research, I've found that higher IQ predicts more pro-market views. It's puzzling, then, that more Open people would be less pro-market, especially since Gerber et al don't control for IQ
- The association between Emotional Stability and conservative economic attitudes might be understood in similar, but differently-valenced terms. The positive pole of this trait is associated with emotional security and hardiness. The negative end (sometimes labeled "Neuroticism") is associated with a tendency to feel anger, guilt, and sadness
