A series of three studies has found that political liberals tend to see emotions as more functional than more conservative people. This comes in spite of the fact that more liberal participants reported less emotional well-being. The research was published in Motivation and Emotion.
Over the past few decades, society in the United States has become more polarized. Liberals and conservatives have come to report more animosity towards the other group than warmth for their own group. Both studies and casual observations indicate that at least some of this polarization might come from the way they see and evaluate the importance of emotions.
The commonly endorsed stereotypes about the two political orientations also revolve around their attitude towards the importance of emotions. According to these stereotypes, liberals are seen as “bleeding-hearts,” emphasizing the importance of emotions, while conservatives are seen as cold, emphasizing a lower value assigned to emotions.
Conservative memes expressing scorn for liberal emotions such as “Facts don’t care about your feelings” and “America runs on liberal tears” also emphasize this difference. The authors of the new research see this contrast between the two political orientations as differences in their beliefs about how functional emotions are.
“We define functional as beneficial for individuals for adapting to the environment or attaining their goals,” they explained. “Traditionally, emotion was often portrayed as a dysfunctional reaction that derailed rational thinking and signaled weakness and vulnerability. Unemotional stoicism was idealized as a sign of rationality and maturity. Recent academic approaches, while acknowledging that emotions are not always helpful, portray emotion as an essential suite of processes that evolved to guide people’s thoughts and plans in a manner that helps them achieve their goals.”
With this, the researchers set up a series of three studies to examine “whether people across the partisan spectrum hold differing beliefs about the functionality of emotion.”
In the first study, they analyzed data from an online survey of 189 undergraduate student from a university in California (89% female). Researchers analyzed assessments of beliefs about the functionality of emotions, openness to experience, well-being (assessed as life satisfaction, depression and anxiety), the intensity of emotional experience, emotion regulation, political partisanship, and religiosity (or the importance of religion in the respondent’s life).
Results showed that the more liberal the participants were, the more they viewed emotions as functional. More liberal participants also reported less well-being and reported that they experience emotions more intensely than more conservative participants.
The second study analyzed data from an online survey of 629 Californian and Texan undergraduates (351 from California, 77% female). The researchers analyzed data on the grade the student expected to receive an the upcoming exam, student’s appraisal of the importance of the exam, beliefs about the functionality of emotions, and well-being. These data were collected before the exam. After the exam, students completed another survey from which researchers analyzed data on the received grade at the exam and student’s emotional response to it along with political partisanship and religiosity.
Results replicated findings of the first study about the link between liberal orientation and viewing emotions as functional. Analyses revealed that people more open to experience and female participants saw emotions as more functional. Participants who received the expected grade and had viewed emotions as functional were happier about the outcome than those who viewed emotions as less functional. This association was not found in students whose grade was lower than expected.
The third study was an online survey of 537 Californian and Texan university students who completed questionnaires before and after the 2020 U.S. presidential election (439 from California, 77% female, 66% voted, 10% not eligible to vote). The questionnaire completed before the elections asked about political partisanship, beliefs about the functionality of emotions, well-being, and assessed the extent to which participants endorsed individualizing versus social binding values.
Afterward, students completed assessments of the importance of the outcome of the 2020 presidential elections, whether they saw it as positive or negative, and their emotional response to the election. They were also asked to report on how they voted. Results showed that liberals viewed emotions as more functional than conservatives and replicated the main findings of the previous two studies.
The researchers then used the data to estimate “progressivism”.
“We defined progressivism as the extent to which each participant prioritized the ‘individuating’ moral foundations of Care and Fairness more than the ‘socially binding’ moral foundations of Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity when judging actions to be right or wrong,” they explained. Further analyses showed that the link between liberalism and viewing emotions as functional was largely explained by liberal participants’ greater endorsement of individualizing than social binding values.
“Our findings suggest though that liberals view emotion as a feature of rationality while conservatives view it as a bug. Across three studies, liberals viewed emotion as more functional than conservatives – that is, as a healthy source of information about the self that provides direction in life rather than as a weakness and a waste of time,” the study authors concluded.
The study makes a valuable contribution to understanding the nature of differences between people of opposing political orientations. However, it has limitations that need to be taken into account. Namely, all the participants were undergraduate students, they were overwhelmingly female and of liberal political orientation. Studies on the general population and more conservative groups might not yield equal results.
The study, “Do liberals value emotion more than conservatives? Political partisanship and Lay beliefs about the functionality of emotion”, was authored by Minyoung Choi, Melissa M. Karnaze, Heather C. Lench, and Linda J. Levine.
