True American Grit

 

            Have you ever wondered why conservatives seem to insist that poor people are poor because they are lazy? It could be that this is a worldview baked into political conservatism.

            That’s what a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences seems to imply.  The study provides some evidence that conservatives have greater levels of self-control than do liberals.  According to the study, this flows from their belief that their success is largely attributable to their own actions a belief that strengthens as conservative identification strengthens.

            I’ve provided a link to the study HERE for anyone who wants to read it.  There are some methodological issues—small, unrepresentative samples and a reliance on self-identification top my list—but still, the results are plausible and generally consistent with what we know about the personality traits of conservatives.

            If you’re trying to make policy, that policy is going to be informed by one’s worldview.  And that worldview, in turn, is going to be informed by one’s own life experiences.  Conservatives may well see that their own success in life bears a direct link with how much effort they put in.  According to the study, the more firmly a conservative held this belief, the more self-control he or she exhibited.

            This may lead highly successful conservatives to reason that everyone’s success depends on how much effort they put in: High effort leads to great success, low effort leads to little success.  If you haven’t been successful, that must mean you haven’t tried hard enough.

             Of course, this kind of belief system de-emphasizes the role of external forces like discrimination and pure dumb luck in life outcomes.

            The American creed very much emphasizes the importance of internal factors such as determination and perseverance—we’re currently calling this cocktail of traits “grit”—and so there’s nothing unusual in our culture for our leaders to be emphasizing “hard work” as the way to get ahead.  And, according to the study, reinforcing this idea seems to help conservatives meet their goals.

            But the study also stands for the inference that hectoring liberals about the importance of grit doesn’t seem to work.  When given messages about how grit increases anxiety and frustration, liberals began to outperform conservatives who received the same messages.  Having been told that their belief in grit as the key to success was untrue made conservatives underperform conservatives who received the opposite message.

            Hell is likely to freeze over before even liberal politicians stop talking about the importance of hard work to success.  But this study tells us that those messages resonate more with conservatives than liberals.  If we want to develop policies that encourage everyone to succeed, we need to temper messages about the importance of grit with messages about the importance of external context.