When Sam Gosling studied the differences between liberal and conservative college students, he and his colleagues went snooping for cleaning supplies. In the dorm rooms of conservatives, they found more cans of Ajax and ironing boards.

In an unpublished paper titled “The Secret Lives of Liberals and Conservatives,” Gosling, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, and three other colleagues* looked for the underlying personality traits that defined left and right. Gosling is the author of Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You. He’s a specialist in analyzing what the things people have around them say about their personalities and beliefs. When it comes to politics, your stuff does define you. . . Gosling and his co-authors hypothesized that liberals and conservatives differed in two major “personality dimensions.” Liberals are more likely to be open to experiences. Conservatives would score higher on measures of conscientiousness. Liberals would be more motivated by curiosity, creativity, and diversity of experiences. Conservatives would value following the rules, self-control, and order.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/bigsort/archive/2008/10/28/difference-between-rs-and-ds-it-s-all-in-the-stuff.aspx

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=organization-and-political-leanings

The researchers, whose findings were published today in the journal Science, looked at 46 people who fell into two camps — liberals who supported foreign aid, immigration, pacifism and gun control; and conservatives who advocated defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq war.

In an initial experiment, subjects were shown a series of images that included a bloody face, maggots in a wound and a spider on a frightened face. A device measured the electrical conductance of their skin, a physiological reaction that indicates fear.

In a second experiment, researchers measured eye blinks — another indicator of fear — as subjects responded to sudden blasts of noise.

People with strongly conservative views were three times more fearful than staunch liberals after the effects of gender, age, income and education were factored out.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-politics19-2008sep19,0,6283617.story

By that reckoning, I should be right of Pat Buchanan. I fit the description of the conservative kid perfectly. In fact, I was far more conservative than my peers in high school. My “liberalization” was a process of ideological changes beginning with a dose of Libertarianism through the medium of Robert A Heinlein, which led me to a deeper analysis of history and, then, sociology, finally coming to the conclusion that conservatism was little more than elitist power-hoarding.

To be fair, though, I can’t claim to be a liberal, either. I find a lot of liberal thinking mushy, particularly in those areas of Realpolitik and the hard-edged “facts” of the human race’s proclivities that seem to make conservative thinking so solid. Both sides, to my mind, avoid central issues by a variety of mechanisms which allow them to embrace their own vision of what ought to be at the expense of recognizing what’s actually in front of them.

But all in all, I would have to say that I lean more to the liberal. I like classical music and jazz, abstract art, books on a wide range of topics, and my office is a wreck.