Why Conservatives Find Life More Meaningful Than Liberals
Polarization has become so severe that what news you read, who you marry, and what kind of car you drive is connected to your political persuasion. And so is, it turns out, whether you see the point in literally anything.
In a new study of people in 16 different countries, researchers from the University of Southern California and the University of Utah found that conservatives reported feeling there was more meaning and purpose in life than liberals did.
The authors performed a series of five studies, all of which replicated each others’ findings. Conservatives found life more meaningful in data sets from several countries in the early 1980s, in a nationally representative data set of Americans in 2007, and in data collected between 2010 and 2017.
