Conservatives Happier Than Liberals --

Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer

LiveScience.com Wed May 7, 8:32 AM ET

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.

Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the new study found. Conservatives also scored highest on measures of rationalization, which gauge a person's tendency to justify, or explain away, inequalities.

The rationalization measure included statements such as: "It is not really that big a problem if some people have more of a chance in life than others," and "This country would be better off if we worried less about how equal people are."

To justify economic inequalities, a person could support the idea of meritocracy, in which people supposedly move up their economic status in society based on hard work and good performance. In that way, one's social class attainment, whether upper, middle or lower, would be perceived as totally fair and justified.

If your beliefs don't justify gaps in status, you could be left frustrated and disheartened, according to the researchers, Jaime Napier and John Jost of New York University. They conducted a U.S.-centric survey and a more internationally focused one to arrive at the findings...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080507/sc_livescience/conservativeshappierthanliberals


Why doesn't this surprise me?

Gee, yall, if we were conservatives, we wouldn't be so frustrated and disheartened. :sarcasm:

Too bad the DUzies are on hiatus for two weeks... I'd nominate your reply

PEACE!

Ghost

even about their own happiness.

pretty self-delusional.

Their Escalade gets 12 mpg, they owe $270k on a house worth $180k, and they have all of their credit cards maxed out...life is good!

It coincides with my far-left shift, I guess.

It's so easy to hang out a flag, stick a magnet on your car and drive your fat ass around like you have anything to do with the "success" of the war. The poster boy for this group is a bigoted, hard headed, smirking swaggering puppet. They will not go back into their holes quietly, they are primed and pumped to "kick some ass" of anyone who would rather see the whole picture and want peace.

your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore.

but John Prine never anticipated those...

and victim-blaming.

:eyes:
rocknation

:hippie:

We said that one of the traits of a conservative was the ability to not care about the suffering of others.

If meritocracy had any merit, my Grandfather would've been retired at 25, but here he is working at 59 after NINE back operations.

Anyway, of course conservatives are happier. Its so easy to be happy when you live by the principles of either xtianity or ayn rand's objectivism.

xtianity:
Nothing here matters, my invisible god will take care of it all.

objectivism:
me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, oh my daughter needs an operation? screw her, its all about ME, ME, ME, I don't give two shits 'bout anybody else.

I'd rather live a sad, REALIST's life than be happy in the fantasy world of "I don't care 'bout nobody else and neither should I."

So maybe it's all repressed.

...and which we cannot possibly win (to use their own words).

Maybe it depends on how you define "happy."

How sick is that?

as the conservatives I know are pretty unhappy people, always bitching, whining and complaining about something. Seriously, what do you hear when you listen to nazi talkradio? Complain, moan, etc. :eyes:

are out to "git" them and their fortified family. It's very reflexive: despite The Dragons of Eden, most amphibia have more control over their reflexes--selfishness just lets them remove those controls.

has the highest level of anti-depressant use. Plus, there's almost a taboo against admitting you're unhappy because Mormons believe that if they are unhappy, it's because they're sinning somehow. So, they might not admit it if they are unhappy. It's my experience that jack-Mormons who don't actively attend church are just as unlikely to admit to unhappiness, maybe even more unlikely.

I can't speak for the other 49 states, but a study like this in Utah would be highly, highly suspect.

,,,they are just fucking stupid!

mark

(Could hardly avoid thinking about it since the story keeps coming up at the top of my Yahoo page.)

As I mentioned in my previous post, Utah is extremely conservative, yet tops the nation in use of anti-depressants. There's also a sort of taboo about talking about being unhappy as being unhappy is seen as a sort of personal failing. I think of my next-door neighbors who look like the picture-perfect, big, happy, Mormon family on the outside, but to close friends they admit that they're all depressed despite using heavy doses of anti-depressants. Except the youngest and he's on ritalin. But you'd have to know them really well to know that they're anything less than the happiest family in town.

In my previous post, I was saying how I don't know how that taboo about talking about unhappiness applies across the rest of the nation, but I think it probably does apply. If a person believes in pure meritocracy as conservatives have been convinced to do by constantly having it driven into their heads by talk-radio,etc., of course they will see their unhappiness as a personal failing and be ashamed of it and unwilling to admit to it.

I have a friend from Michigan who is a really nice guy, but quite conservative. He works at a shitty job for shitty pay and has shitty insurance. He's in debt up to his eyeballs with no way out. Yet he claims to be happy as a clam as long as he has enough cheap beer, can roll his own ciggies, and watch football on his big-screen t.v. bought on credit. However, once he's had a few beers too many, he starts to cry about how miserable he is. And of course, he denies it the next day.

So I think that all conservatives are doing with their rationalization (denial?), is putting on the facade of happiness they think is expected of them.

*Another factor is out-right selfishness. For example, watching what happened and is still happening in New Orleans after Katrina tears me up big time. But conservatives I talked to blamed the victims for being "too stupid to leave." (The unspoken subtext was that they were to blame simply because they were black.) Never mind that they didn't have cars and the buses had stopped running too soon to be of help. These conservatives were also were outraged about the "looting", but about not the fact that people were stuck in the Super Dome for days without water, or about the levies not having been maintained. I think our culture trains us to value the property of the rich more than the lives of the poor.

I suppose turning off your sympathy for others might make a person superficially happy, but it's a kind of happiness I want no part of.

"You've got yours. I've got mine. Meet the decline."

be why they're able to maintain their state of denial.

eom

How happy can they be like that?

that certainly seems to contradict the findings of this study!!

I know a few of these guys from my workplace, and they strike me as being wound a little too tightly - wait'll they get a load of my Obama bumper sticker once things become official, or at least presumptive!

Watch "Stimpy's Inventions" for a graphic explanation of the phenomenon.

And after Katrina, they were not sad either.

It has often been said that a drunk while drunk is happier than one who is sober.