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Are there personality differences between liberals and conservatives?

Are there personality differences between liberals and conservatives?

  • Yes

    Votes: 10 71.4%
  • No

    Votes: 4 28.6%

  • Total voters
    14

Viking11

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This is what it seems to me after years of experience with conservatives and liberals on the internet and IRL:

Conservatives tend to be conscientious, vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, and vindictive.

Liberals tend to be careless, modest, trusting, unguarded, lenient and forgiving.
 
I think there certainly can be, although it's not an automatic thing.
 
This is what it seems to me after years of experience with conservatives and liberals on the internet and IRL:

Conservatives tend to be conscientious, vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, and vindictive.

Liberals tend to be careless, modest, trusting, unguarded, lenient and forgiving.

I see all these traits in people of both parties.

Perhaps, you are not seeing past the end of your own nose.
 
Hell yes. Liberals look outside themselves for things while conservatives tend towards being self sufficient.
 
On AVERAGE, perhaps. But I don't think it is all that dramatic and certainly can't be used to predict the personality of any individual.
 
This is what it seems to me after years of experience with conservatives and liberals on the internet and IRL:

Conservatives tend to be conscientious, vain, suspicious, guarded, strict, and vindictive.

Liberals tend to be careless, modest, trusting, unguarded, lenient and forgiving.


You're not serious with this are you? Some of the meanest people I know are 'liberals'. Some very fine folks are liberals. Some Conservatives are total tools. Some are great people to know.

I think it's more how passionately one believes rather than what one believes; as passionate people tend to be more prone to rash statements or displays of anger.
 
According to a number of studies, yes, there most certainly are some innate differences (on average, at least).

Conservatives tend to be more pragmatic, cautious, and deliberate in how they operate. While they do have a bit of an authoritarian steak when it comes to matters of security, they also tend to be less socially minded and more personally independent than Liberals, basically taking a "live and let live" stance on most issues in their day-to-day lives. They are also more prone to think in terms of common defense against outside forces, and place high value in more traditional principles, like loyalty, strength, duty, and industriousness.

Liberals are usually idealists, often to the point of being outright reckless about it. They like to think of themselves as being anti-authoritarian "special little snowflakes," but they also (somewhat paradoxically) tend to be a lot more reliant upon groups of extremely like-minded persons for mutual support, and more prone to trying to use the weight of such groups to enforce compliance with their ideals. They tend to not really care about more traditional value sets, valuing free expression and "fairness" above basically all else. In keeping with their idealism, they tend to not really care about matters of security either, just kind of hoping that everyone can get along if they make enough of an effort to reach out to them.

Broadly defined, I guess it's kind of an "ST" vs "NF" difference, by and large. Though... Of course, subsets of both groups branch into different thought styles. "NTs" on both sides are largely the agenda and ideology setters, and there's plenty of "J" to go around on both sides as well.
 
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Of course not always, but perhaps on average.

And of course there are many more ideologies and nuances than the binary choice "conservative vs. liberal" suggests.

As for the average, I'd say people on the "right-wing" are much more authoritarian than those on the "left-wing", with all that comes with it. They are less trusting, more fearful and easier afraid, or, positively worded, "more aware of risk and threat".

People on the "left-wing", on the other side, are much more trusting, not as easily scared, less aware of risk and threat, and thus very capable for cooperation. Both sides seem to be about even in numbers.

Both have their pros and cons, depending which traits are required in a given situation. But interesting enough, on the scale of entire peoples, both sides often enough don't change their attitudes, regardless of the situation society faces:

For example, when Hitler was about conquering world dominance and murdering hundreds of millions of people, very trusting and risk-unaware left-wing pacifists were still protesting for peace in America. Although the situation very obviously was very risky and required urgent response.

Likewise, even in situations when risks are minimal, and the best and most promising course of action would be trust, cooperation and compromise, because risks are low, the right-wingers are still wetting their pants, exaggerate the minimal risk, and destroy opportunities with their distrust. Perhaps even call for waging stupid wars.

It looks like over the course of history, a society needs both sides to be able to deal with the different kinds of challenges it faces. Sometimes it's one side, sometimes the other. If one of both was missing in a given situation, a society could get into real trouble.
 
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