This column will change your life: selfishness

The Guardian:

It’s a fairly well-established fact, in political psychology, that leftwingers report lower levels of happiness than rightwingers. (This fact, you may have noticed, is self-reinforcing: learning of it makes leftwingers even gloomier.) What’s much less clear is why. Conservatives like to argue that it’s because the things they value – traditional families, faith, free markets – make people happiest. Liberals prefer to think conservatives are blinkered, clinging to an ideology that lets them avoid confronting life’s grim truths; it’s even been proposed that conservatism might be a mental illness. And there’s an added complication: the social psychologists who study such questions, as the American academic Jonathan Haidt has complained, tend to lean left. But does that mean they are biased – or that, when you closely study the real world, you usually end up liberal? (“Reality has a well-known liberal bias” – Stephen Colbert.) It’s all very murky – though if you’re a liberal, like me, that’s less of a problem, as studies suggest we might have more capacity for tolerating uncertainty. So there’s that.

Read the whole story: The Guardian