Liberalism, in a Big Five result, means readiness to question tradition, authority, and the rules you were handed. It describes how you treat a received answer. It is not a party and it is not a vote.
It also carries the worst label in the inventory. Costa and McCrae named this part of Openness Values, defining it as readiness to re-examine social, political, and religious ideas 1. The public-domain version most tests now run relabelled it Liberalism — and plenty of people read that word on a report as a voter registration card.
What the Liberalism facet measures in the Big Five
Liberalism is the sixth and last facet of Openness to Experience, the trait covering appetite for ideas, art, feeling, and novelty. On the IPIP-NEO-120 it is measured with four items: two about which way you vote, one about whether right and wrong are absolute, and one about how tough the law should be on crime.
Two of the four ask about voting, which is a real weakness of the scale: a measure phrased in candidates picks up party along with the disposition underneath it. The disposition is the part worth reading. It is whether "that is simply how it is done" lands on you as a reason or as a non-answer.
What the high pole looks like
Rules get asked to justify themselves. Not broken, not resented, asked. A policy that cannot say what it is for gets treated as provisional.
Inherited answers get reopened. The religion you were raised in, the politics of the household, the career your family assumed. High scorers went through all three rather than around them.
Moral judgements come out contextual. Fewer bright lines, more of it depends on what was going on, which reads as thoughtful to some people and slippery to others.
Accounts from outside the system get a hearing. A complaint about an institution is treated as possible information rather than an attack.
What the low pole looks like
Standing practice gets the benefit of the doubt. The first question is not what this rule is for, it is what breaks if it goes. A working arrangement is treated as evidence that something was solved here once.
Moral answers do not move with the audience. The same standard applies to the friend and the stranger, and it gets said out loud in the room where saying it costs something.
The burden of proof sits on whoever wants the change. A reorganisation, a new curriculum, a rewritten policy: it is asked which problem it solves before it gets a pilot, not after.
Commitments outlive the conditions that made them convenient. The obligation taken on last year still holds this year, when a better offer has turned up and nobody would have noticed it quietly lapsing.
Fairly stated, that default is right more often than the modern telling admits. Customs usually encode solutions to problems nobody alive remembers having, and the person who makes you explain what the fence is for before tearing it down prevents real damage. The cost is the other side of the same setting: when a practice genuinely is unjust, the disposition that protects continuity protects the injustice a while longer too.
What the facet predicts, and what it does not
At population scale, Openness is the strongest Big Five correlate of self-reported political orientation 2. That is a claim about averages over thousands of people, and it is much weaker than it sounds once you point it at one of them. A tendency of that size is not a sorting: the two groups overlap heavily, plenty of high scorers vote right, plenty of low scorers vote left, and knowing the score barely moves the guess. Family, region, class, religion, and who you live among predict a vote far better than any trait does.
The links also differ by issue domain, so the trait that tracks social positions is not the one that tracks economic positions 3. Our own reading of that is the reason to stop looking for a political facet at all: an ideology is a bundle of positions held across domains, and no single scale moves with the whole bundle. The population-level picture is worked through in why Openness predicts political views more than IQ does.
The word is doing two different jobs
| Liberalism the facet | Liberalism the political tradition | |
|---|---|---|
| What it names | how readily you re-examine tradition, authority, and inherited rules | a family of philosophies built on individual liberty, rights, and consent |
| Where it comes from | four items in a personality inventory | two centuries of argument, meaning different things in the US and in Europe |
| What a high score tells you | something about how you hold a position | nothing directly about which positions you hold |
That last row is the point, and it is also where the scale gives itself away. The construct is how you hold a position; half the items ask which positions you hold. Take the conservative who arrived at their politics by pulling apart everything they were raised with — process is the whole story of how they got there, and the voting items push their score toward the low end regardless. A reflective conservative is precisely the person this facet mismeasures.
So read this one narrowly. It is the easiest facet on the report to over-read, and the useful question it asks has nothing to do with elections: when someone tells you that this is simply how things are done, what does that sentence do to you?
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References
Footnotes
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Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources. ↩
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Carney, D. R., Jost, J. T., Gosling, S. D., & Potter, J. (2008). The secret lives of liberals and conservatives. Political Psychology, 29(6), 807–840. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2008.00668.x ↩
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Gerber, A. S., Huber, G. A., Doherty, D., Dowling, C. M., & Ha, S. E. (2010). Personality and political attitudes. American Political Science Review, 104(1), 111–133. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055410000031 ↩