According to recent research at Illinois, the goings-on at your state capital and other public offices are more clearly influenced by you and your neighbors’ personality types than we previously knew.
Political science professors Jeffery Mondak and Damarys Canache compared personality data from more than 600,000 Americans who had responded to an online research survey to state-level measures of political culture, as identified by other, unrelated research. The results were striking.
“Variation in personality across the American states corresponds quite strongly with states’ core political characteristics,” Mondak and Canache wrote in a paper published in the March issue of the journal Political Research Quarterly.
For example, among the researchers’ findings was that states with lower levels of conscientiousness or higher levels of agreeableness were very likely to have a political culture that saw government as a positive force committed to the collective good. States lower in agreeableness were very likely to have a political culture focused on individualism and smaller government.
Also, states that were higher in openness to experience had citizenries that tended to be ideologically liberal. Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon are all good examples of that, Mondak says, since they all were among the highest in both categories.
States with higher levels of conscientiousness, on the other hand, were very likely to have a political culture more committed to maintaining traditional social hierarchies, and to have populations that were more ideologically conservative. Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee all are good examples.
The researchers also found links between personality traits and other criteria related to political and civic culture. States that collectively showed more openness to experience, for example, had higher rates of women in state legislatures and home Internet access. Those high in conscientiousness had higher rates of violent crime, as well as lower rates of home Internet access.
The study does not prove a cause and effect, but instead only a correlation between collective personality traits and political culture within states, says Mondak, the James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership, who has been studying the intersection between psychology and politics for nearly two decades. Establishing the connection is significant, however.
“It’s important that we figure out what makes individuals tick and then how that connects to what makes societies tick,” he says. “Now we know that these individual-level psychological properties are related—and strongly related—to key aspects of political culture that have been studied for decades.”
Mondak’s study of personality and politics is based on the “five factor” or “Big Five” model that has revolutionized the study of personality since the late 1980s. The model provides a structure for grouping hundreds of personality traits under five broad dimensions: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness (friendly vs. more distant), and neuroticism (or its reverse, emotional stability).
In fact, many personality tests that have become popular online—such as those offering to tell you which U.S. president or Seinfeld character you’re most like—are based on the “Big Five,” Mondak says.
All of the five dimensions are on a continuum and the model is not designed to make judgments about certain traits or suggest any ideal personality, he says. Being open to experience, for instance, can make someone more open to both good and bad, and healthy and unhealthy, behaviors.
These links between personality and politics are all the more interesting because the difference in collective personality between states is small, Mondak says.
“Individuals vary a lot in their personalities. States don’t vary a lot. We’re talking about just a few percentage points,” he says, adding that it’s not that surprising, however, when you consider that a small swing of voters in closely contested states can result in dramatically different policies.
