Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
People who have a conservative political ideology have more self-control than those identifying themselves as liberals, researchers from the University of Cincinnati reported in this week’s early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
In three separate studies, assistant marketing professor Joshua John Clarkson and his colleagues examined the link between a person’s political leanings and two key indicators of self-control in humans (attention regulation and task persistence). They found that conservatives scored higher in both traits consistently and independent of race, age, gender or other factors.
Two of the studies detailed in the report involved tasks conducted by undergraduate students at a pair of Midwestern universities over the past year, while the third involved 135 people across the US who took part in a survey through the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, the authors said.
Studies gauged attention devoted to, time spent on tasks
In one study, 147 undergraduate students were asked to sit in front of a computer screen. Each individual was presented with a word representing a color displayed on a background of another color. Clarkson and his colleagues examined how quickly participants would respond with the word, controlling for correctness.
Those identifying themselves as conservative were as correct as liberals, but they were able to perform the tasks more quickly, suggesting that they could be “better able to fixate their attention on a task,” Clarkson said. In a separate study at a second university, 176 undergraduate students performed the same task, and the results were similar, with both ideologies performing the tasks well but self-described conservatives responding faster.
In the third trial, 135 Americans used Amazon Mechanical Turk to participate in several self-control tasks involving seven-letter anagrams. For each anagram, the individuals were asked to create as many English-language words that adhered to a set of rules (for example, were at least three letters long), and told that they could decide when they wanted to stop. Liberals spent less time on the tasks than conservatives, the authors found.
“When marketers consider self-control, we tend to think of sticking to a diet or exercise regimen, not wandering off your grocery list or avoiding impulsive purchases,” Clarkson said. “All of these behaviors exhibit elements of attention regulation and persistence. Ultimately, however, it all comes down to believing whether or not you can control your own behavior, and what we’re finding is that conservatives are more likely to believe they can control their own behavior.”
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