Political liberals exhibit more happiness than conservatives, UCI study finds

Renewing the debate over whether political conservatives or liberals have a lock on happiness, new research out of UC Irvine found that liberals behave happier.

In a study published this month in the journal Science, UC Irvine psychologists found that left-leaning partisans display happier speech patterns and facial expressions, according to a university statement issued Thursday. The research runs counter to previous reports that political conservatives are happier — findings based on self-reports of happiness, according to the study authors.

Such self-reports, the authors suggest, can be inflated by the desire to see oneself in a positive light.

“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,” Peter Ditto, UCI professor of psychology and social behavior and co-author of the paper, said in a statement.

“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.”

To measure differences in happiness-related behavior, the scientists analyzed millions of words from Congressional Record transcripts and the photographs of every member of Congress, as well as 47,000 tweets and nearly 500 photos from LinkedIn. They found that liberals more frequently used positive language and smiled more intensely and genuinely in photographs, which ran contrary to conservative’s self-reported pattern of happiness.

Most people “will rate themselves above average,” Sean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology and social behavior at UCI and lead author of the study, said in the statement. “We observed that effect to be stronger among conservatives than liberals.”

This tendency, Wojcik suggests, isn’t necessarily a bad thing. “There’s research saying that self-enhancement is related to improved social relations, productive and creative work, and other beneficial outcomes,” Wojcik said in the statement.