Leftists Scramble to Explain Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals – The American

More than five decades of social psychological data have demonstrated that conservatives report greater levels of happiness and emotional health than liberals. All of this has been so well documented that, for the most part, modern social scientists have given up trying to dismiss the data and have instead tried to explain why.

Some researchers have suggested that conservatives simply tend to provide responses on surveys that are more socially desirable. But the data dispute this. It is a simple statistical strategy to control for social desirability in analyzing the data, and most researchers know this.

Others have claimed that conservatives are more likely to rationalize inequality and feel “justified” in feeling good about themselves and their lives — even at the expense of others.

Drawing from system justification theory, some researchers claim that the disparities in levels of happiness are associated with the endorsement by conservatives of a “fairly wide range of rationalizations of current social, economic and political institutions and arrangements.” These researchers claim that conservatives have developed an “ideological buffer against the negative hedonistic consequences of social and economic inequality.”

In other words, liberals think that conservatives just don’t care about others, and that is why they are happier.

Liberals Are Just Unhappy

Progressive researchers may have suggested that liberals’ “unhappiness reflects social concern,” as they more conscious of “social injustices and dangers,” but in a 2022 survey of a representative sample of 1,831 Americans, Tufts University researchers concluded that even when controlling for social consciousness and concern for the plight of others, “being liberal is still also related to being unhappy … specific concerns seem to accompany unhappiness but do not explain away the ideological ‘effect.’”

The Tufts researchers pointed out that it is not just that liberals are unhappy; liberals are much more likely to have been diagnosed with clinical depression. Suggesting that people with depression “cluster on the Left,” the Tufts researchers reported that of all Americans who voted for Joe Biden in 2020, 16 percent reported having been diagnosed with clinical depression.

Liberals are just unhappy people — and it is not because they care for others more than conservatives. In the Tufts study, the researchers conclude:

[I]f a liberal and a conservative have the same income, education, race, gender, age, marital status, and religious attendance, the conservative will feel more fortunate … liberals are people who—regardless of their actual social positions—rate their own circumstances relatively poorly, and that attitude drives their ideology and makes them unhappy or else reflects their unhappiness.

These data cannot be easily dismissed because they are so consistent. Liberals are unhappy because they are just unhappy, and this correlation holds true for liberal teens. A study by Columbia University researchers entitled “The Politics of Depression,” published in the journal Social Science and Medicine in December 2022, found that conservative teenagers (defined in the study as those who support individual liberty, religion, and free markets) are in general significantly happier than their liberal peers. Findings indicated that conservative teens reported “lower average depressive affect, self-derogation, and loneliness scores and higher self-esteem scores than all other groups.” Between 2011 and 2018, female liberals had a steep increase in depressive affect. Interestingly, the researchers found that the more educated the families were, the more likely their child was to be depressed.

Families make a difference when it comes to the emotional health and happiness of their children. University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox, who also directs the National Marriage Project, suggests that “two family factors” have a lot to do with the ideological happiness gap: “marital status and family satisfaction.” Wilcox continues:

Given that conservatives aged 18-55 are about 20 percentage points more likely to be married as well as 18 percentage points more likely to be satisfied with their families, the lesson here is obvious. Marriage and family are strongly linked to happiness and to personal mental health in particular.

The American Family Survey found that 48 percent of conservative men are “completely satisfied” in their marriage, and 42 percent of conservative married women are completely satisfied. Only 36 percent of liberal women and 38 percent of liberal men said that they are completely satisfied with their marriage.

Conservatives Are Statistically More Physically Attractive

One area in happiness research that seems to get little attention is physical attractiveness. Physically attractive people are more likely to claim that they are happy. And the most recent research by Danish and Swedish researchers, published in May 2023, found that conservative women (or those identified as “right-wing”) were significantly more attractive than liberal women. Using artificial intelligence (Face API by Microsoft Azure’s Cognitive Services) and a publicly available scoring system, a European study of thousands of faces revealed that AI was correct 61 percent of the time at predicting the political leanings of a person based on just one photo of his or her face.

The researchers — a group of three psychologists and political scientists — selected 3,323 publicly submitted headshots of political candidates for analysis in a neural network capable of facial expression coding and classification. The researchers found that “right wing women [were more] attractive.” The results were even more accurate for men — 65 percent of the time, researchers could identify right-wing men from left-wing men. The report concluded:

The team was much more confident in the neural net’s findings linking a high attractiveness rating with conservative views.

“These results are credible given that previous research using human raters has also highlighted a link between attractiveness and conservatism,” the authors wrote.

The results of the physical attractiveness study revealed that 80 percent of the faces displayed a happy expression, while 19 percent read as neutral: “The deep-learning algorithm did catch one unusual distinction, however: female, left-wing political candidates were slightly more likely to be read by the neural net as having a face expressing contempt.”

While trying to explain the fact that physically attractive people are more likely to be conservative, a Washington Post reporter concluded that since numerous studies have shown that attractive people are likely to earn more and, thus, are happy because they “have more” than others. Since people who earn more are typically more opposed to redistributive policies and welfare, these attractive people are more likely to be conservative.

Two professors from universities in the Midwest have attempted to claim that attractive people are more likely to be conservative and, therefore, happy because “they are blind to life’s struggles.” Suggesting that physically attractive people have had it “too easy” in getting jobs, raises, and partners and cannot identify with those who struggle, these professors conclude that beauty makes them less empathetic toward those who find life a struggle — and, therefore, they are attracted to a conservative ideology.

It is easy to reject the simplistic conclusions that attractive people do not care for others and that freedom from concern about social injustice is what makes attractive people happy conservatives. A face that is viewed by AI as “showing contempt” is always going to be an unattractive face, no matter how much that individual claims to care for others.

The reality is that true happiness, and a truly satisfying life, comes from caring for others — being physically present to them. Conservatives know that marriage and family life make one happy. Taking care of one’s own children and one’s own elderly family members is what makes us happiest and most fulfilled. Conservatives are significantly less likely to use the state or other non-familial institutions to do this kind of caregiving.

They know that true happiness comes from selflessness — living for others. And this is why they are happier.