A new research contradicts earlier self-reports of higher spirits among political conservatives by stating that liberals exhibit happier speech patterns and facial expressions.
Lead author Sean Wojcik of University Of California-Irvine said that the so-called "happiness gap" between liberals and conservatives is more complicated than previously thought.
Prior findings that political conservatives are happier than political liberals have been based on self-reports of happiness, but claims about one's happiness, just like claims about one's intelligence or morality, can be inflated by the desire to see oneself in a positive light.
Co-author Peter Ditto said that if you want to know how happy someone is, one way to do it is to just ask them, and this logic has been relied upon heavily in research on subjective well-being, but another way to think about it is that happy is as happy does and looking at happiness-related behavior avoids the issue of someone striving to present him or herself as a happy person.
Wojcik added that they were surprised by how consistently happiness-related behavior was predicted by having a liberal political ideology and they saw similar patterns of emotional language and smiling behavior among Congress members, Twitter users and LinkedIn users.
Wojcik noted that people tend to report all kinds of traits and abilities in an overly favorable way. If you ask people to rate themselves across almost any set of positive traits, intelligence, social skills, even driving ability, most will rate themselves above average. Researchers observed that effect to be stronger among conservatives than liberals.
There's research saying that self-enhancement is related to improved social relations, productive and creative work, and other beneficial outcomes, he noted.
The study appears in Science.
