New research casts doubts on the theory that personality factors are a driving force behind ideology. The study, published in in Journal of Research in Personality, found no evidence that lower Openness to Experience precedes conservative political attitudes.
“As a political psychologist, I’ve always been interested in individual differences underlying political attitudes,” said study author Danny Osborne, an associate professor at The University of Auckland.
“Part of this could be attributed to by non-traditional background. In a family of conservatives, I was the black sheep of my family who went to uni, got a degree, and advocated (and still advocate!) for progressive causes.”
“As such, I’ve been keenly aware since early on that there are notable differences between the personalities of liberals and conservatives. That said, as with practically all between-group differences, cross-partisans have a lot more in common than these subtle differences might suggest.”
For their study, the researchers examined data from the New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a nation-wide 20-year longitudinal survey of social attitudes, personality and health outcomes. More than 17,000 participants completed at least three waves of the study, which included assessments of the Big Five personality traits and political ideology.
In line with previous research, Osborne and his colleagues found that, on average, conservatives scored lower than liberals on a measure of Openness to Experience.
But they found no evidence that changes in Openness to Experience predicted subsequent within-person changes in conservatism or that changes in conservatism predicted subsequent within-person changes in Openness to Experience.
“Our results are the first to compare and contrast the relationship between Openness to Experience and conservatism using two separate analytic approaches (namely, the Cross-Lagged Panel Model [CLPM] and the Random Intercepts-CLPM [RI-CLPM]). Accordingly, our results show — for the first time — that the assumed temporal predominance of personality in predicting conservatism is largely a methodological artefact,” Osborne told PsyPost.
“That is, when you adjust for the confounding of between-person stability and within-person change with an RI-CLPM, Openness to Experience no longer reliably predicts changes in conservatism over time.”
The findings suggest that lower Openness to Experience is not a cause of conservatism. But like all research, the study includes some limitations.
“The biggest caveat to these data are the age range of our sample. Although our sample includes those who are 18 years and older (ranging all the way up to participants who were 94 years old at the start of our 9 year study), it is still possible that personality may temporally preceded the development of political attitudes much earlier in life,” Osborne explained.
“That is, children’s personality at age 5 might affect how much certain political attitudes resonate with them when they are in their early adolescence. Once this “first cause” puts things in motion, however, personality and ideology may be more cross-sectionally (vs. longitudinally) associated.”
“There are also obvious cross-cultural comparisons that need to be done (e.g., do these nil associations replicate in non-WEIRD countries?), as well as finer grained analyses into distinct demographic cleavages within our sample. In short, there’s heaps more work to do,” Osborne said.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be part of an amazing research team since beginning my tenure at the University of Auckland. The NZAVS has afforded so many opportunities to my students and I, and I’m really lucky to have such an excellent collaborator in Chris Sibley.”
The study, “Does Openness to Experience predict changes in conservatism? A nine-wave longitudinal investigation into the personality roots to ideology“, was authored by Danny Osborne and Chris G. Sibley.