The conservative happiness advantage Faith, family life and geography explain why

[truth_seeker]

The conservative happiness advantage
Faith, family life and geography explain why

By Renee Garfinkel - - Tuesday, February 6, 2018

A seemingly endless tide of books and videos, blogs and classes overflow with advice on where to find happiness and how to achieve it. The tide leaves us in its wake, more anxious and worried than ever, wondering what is wrong with us whenever we’re not happy.
The Declaration of Independence guarantees the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and Americans pursue the last one with the greatest vigor.
Right behind them, in close pursuit, come social scientists and psychologists trying to figure out who’s happiest and why.
Their research consistently finds more happy conservatives than liberals.

[truth_seeker]

Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals

 
Arthur C. Brooks JULY 7, 2012

"WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? The answer might seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking. And it was the candidate Barack Obama in 2008 who infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.” Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?

Wrong. Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservatives-are-happier-and-extremists-are-happiest-of-all.html