Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness

Sean P Wojcik; Arpine Hovasapian; Jesse Graham; Matt Motyl; Peter H Ditto

doi:10.1126/science.1260817

Conservatives report, but liberals display, greater happiness

Science. 2015 Mar 13;347(6227):1243-6. doi: 10.1126/science.1260817.

Authors

Sean P Wojcik¹, Arpine Hovasapian², Jesse Graham³, Matt Motyl⁴, Peter H Ditto¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. swojcik@uci.edu phditto@uci.edu.
² Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
³ Department of Psychology, University of Southern California, CA 90089, USA.
⁴ University of Illinois, Chicago, IL 60607, USA.

PMID: 25766233
DOI: 10.1126/science.1260817

Abstract

Research suggesting that political conservatives are happier than political liberals has relied exclusively on self-report measures of subjective well-being. We show that this finding is fully mediated by conservatives' self-enhancing style of self-report (study 1; N = 1433) and then describe three studies drawing from "big data" sources to assess liberal-conservative differences in happiness-related behavior (studies 2 to 4; N = 4936). Relative to conservatives, liberals more frequently used positive emotional language in their speech and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs. Our results were consistent across large samples of online survey takers, U.S. politicians, Twitter users, and LinkedIn users. Our findings illustrate the nuanced relationship between political ideology, self-enhancement, and happiness and illuminate the contradictory ways that happiness differences can manifest across behavior and self-reports.

MeSH terms

Adult
Emotions
Facial Expression
Female
Happiness*
Humans
Language
Male
Middle Aged
Politics*
Self Report
Self-Assessment*
United States