Does Personality Determine Our Political Opinions?

And if so, how ought we treat politics going forward?

The Big-Five Personality Traits Model

We have always lived under the assumption that our political opinions are our own and in the name of not being ideologically driven, have avoided conforming solely to what opinions our political leaders and/or intellectual heroes express. It is quite curious, however, that those who agree on the same policies and values tend to relate in another way: personality. The only question is whether it’s from familial or otherwise indoctrination, intentional or not, from other personal biases, or might it just be innate in everybody to sway towards the politics that best match their personality traits?

The Big-Five Personality trait model consists of five different traits which include openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Those who are high in openness express a willingness to make an attempt at new experiences. Highly conscientious people tend to pay attention to details, have a set schedule and are generally goal-oriented. The difference between people who are high in extroversion and those who are not is sociability and energetic behavior. Agreeableness refers to the degree to which one is trusting and cooperative. Finally, neuroticism is simply emotional stability. This model has empirical support, as people in more than fifty different cultures exhibit these five personality traits.

To be clear, the Big-Five model is used as a tool to summarize the vast majority of personality traits and their correlation to political affiliation. There are plenty exceptions to the rule, as one that deals with statistics of any sort would certainly expect. It is also important to note that ideology is usually measured by self-proclamation.

Lines in bold represent the central paths by which personality traits are hypothesized to affect political behavior. Additional solid lines represent other known antecedents of political behavior and dashed lines represent additional plausible antecedents of political behavior.

Conscientiousness and openness are used most frequently in studies determining whether personality plays a significant role in one’s political opinions. And personality does play a role in determining both social and economic policies. Conscientiousness, for example, is associated with conservative ideology when it comes to both social and economic policy. The reason why is clear once one considers what conservatives value. It is tradition and norms that conservatives value and it is adherence to rules and norms that conscientious people exhibit.

Contrarily, openness to experience is associated with liberal ideology. Openness to new experiences is the very definition of liberal, as liberals tend to support new (or at least not traditional) ideas in economic policy. Liberals are also open-minded when it comes to social policy, as one might notice from their acceptance of things like gay marriage.

Any attempt to study the relation between agreeableness and extroversion with respect to political ideology resulted in low correlation either way. On the other hand, neuroticism is somewhat relative to liberal ideology and negatively correlated with conservatism. This is because liberals tend to support safety-nets and other policies of similar nature. But these results are quite modest.

With these results, it definitely isn’t safe to say that we have all the information we need on the relation between personality and political ideology, but we do have enough to conclude that the former plays a significant role in determining the latter.