What does it mean to be happy? Is it how happy you say you are, or is it how happy you act? Previous research has found that political conservatives report being happier than political liberals. But UC Irvine psychologists have discovered that those on the left exhibit happier speech patterns and facial expressions.
"The so-called 'happiness gap' between liberals and conservatives is more complicated than we thought," said Sean Wojcik, a doctoral student in psychology & social behavior at UCI and lead author of the study, which appears this month in Science.
Prior findings that political conservatives are happier than political liberals have been based on self-reports of happiness. But claims about one's happiness - just like claims about one's intelligence or morality - 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," said Peter Ditto, UCI professor of psychology & social behavior and co-author of the paper. "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."
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