Psychology of Politics

So I was reading this article discussing the correlation between fear, death and conservatism (no, it's not a wild-eyed lefty rant in the slightest...) which incidentally discussed the "real, stable differences in personality" that correlate to political preference. The article references the work of multiple psychological studies of extensive research on personality and preference correlations between conservatives and liberals. You can read the article here, but I thought I'd just paste some of the more interesting findings:

As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3.

Conservatives have a greater desire to reach a decision quickly and stick to it, and are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, orderliness, duty, and rule-following. Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.

Conservatives have less tolerance for ambiguity...Liberals, on the other hand, are "more likely to see gray areas and reconcile seemingly conflicting information,"

Studies show that people who study abroad become more liberal than those who stay home. People who venture from the strictures of their limited social class are less likely to stereotype and more likely to embrace other cultures. Education goes hand-in-hand with tolerance, and often, the more the better.

The more educated people are, the more liberal they become—but only to a point. Once people begin pursuing certain types of graduate degrees, the curve flattens. Business students, for instance, become more conservative in their views toward minorities. As they become more established, doctors and lawyers tend to protect their economic interests by moving to the right.

Liberals are messier than conservatives, their rooms have more clutter and more color, and they tend to have more travel documents, maps of other countries, and flags from around the world. Conservatives are neater, and their rooms are cleaner, better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional. Liberals have more books, and their books cover a greater variety of topics. And that's just a start. Multiple studies find that liberals are more optimistic. Conservatives are more likely to be religious. Liberals are more likely to like classical music and jazz, conservatives, country music. Liberals are more likely to enjoy abstract art. Conservative men are more likely than liberal men to prefer conventional forms of entertainment like TV and talk radio. Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men. Liberal women are more likely than conservative women to enjoy books, poetry, writing in a diary, acting, and playing musical instruments.

None of this was surprising to me, and is pretty much how I had categorized liberalism and conservatism. And if reason and intuition is to believed, I think it makes perfect sense. The dead giveaway that I am more liberal (though I deny it somewhat) than anything else?

"Liberal men like romantic comedies more than conservative men." Game. Set. Match.