Can a Liberal Change

Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic

Turns out liberals are the real authoritarians.

A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong.

The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism.

“The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction.

https://nypost.com/2016/06/09/science-says-liberal-beliefs-are-linked-to-pyschotic-traits/

Pew Study: White Liberals Disproportionately Suffer From Mental Illness.

Survey data from a 2020 Pew poll indicates that white liberals disproportionately suffer from mental illness versus their conservative counterparts.

The study, which examined white liberals, moderates, and conservatives, both male and female, found that conservatives were far less likely to be diagnosed with mental health issues than those who identified as either liberal or even “very liberal.”

Young white women suffered the worst.

White women, ages 18-29, who identified as liberal were given a mental health diagnosis from medical professionals at a rate of 56.3%, as compared to 28.4% in moderates and 27.3% in conservatives.

Zach Goldberg, a Ph.D. candidate in political science, consolidated the study’s info in a set of visuals and posted them to a thread on Twitter.

https://wibc.com/108211/pew-study-white-liberals-disproportionately-suffer-from-mental-illness/

Why Being Conservative is Correlated with Higher Happiness

In “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives,” Musa al-Gharbi summarizes many studies that show that conservatives are more likely than liberals/progressives to describe themselves as happy, and this relationship holds when one controls for demographics. In other words, conservatives do not report being happier because they are more advantaged; instead, a conservative who has the same social circumstances as a progressive is likelier to be happy. Al-Garbi says that this finding is consistent across countries and extends back in time.

1. Replicating the basic pattern: conservatism is associated with happiness.

We can confirm the main finding with data from Tufts’ 2022 Equity in America survey. We drew a representative sample of 1,831 Americans, with large subsamples of African Americans and Latinos to allow more precise estimates of racial/ethnic differences. We also collected an extraordinary number of measures about each respondent.

https://equityresearch.tufts.edu/why-being-conservative-is-correlated-with-higher-happiness/