One of the most reliably replicated findings in personality research: of the Big Five traits, Openness predicts political orientation more strongly than the others. In many studies, it also predicts political views better than IQ, income, or education on their own 1.
The finding is real. It is also subtle, often misread, and worth understanding carefully — especially if you care about whether the trait actually explains politics, or just correlates with it.
The basic finding
Across surveys in the United States, the UK, Australia, Germany, and other Western democracies, two Big Five traits consistently line up with political orientation:
- Higher Openness correlates with more liberal positions, especially on social issues
- Higher Conscientiousness correlates with more conservative positions, especially on social issues 2
The Openness effect is the larger of the two. In the Carney, Jost, Gosling, and Potter (2008) study of nearly 2,000 Americans, Openness explained a meaningful share of the variance in self-reported political orientation — more than IQ explained in comparable studies 1.
A separate meta-analysis by Sibley and Duckitt (2008) confirmed the broad pattern across many samples 3. The Openness-liberalism link is one of the most stable findings in political psychology.
Why this surprises people
A lot of public commentary about politics assumes that political views are mostly about facts, education, or self-interest. People reason their way to a position, the story goes, and the trait differences are noise.
The data does not fit that story cleanly. If political views were mostly downstream of factual reasoning, we would expect intelligence and education to be the dominant predictors. They matter, but they matter less than Openness in the studies that compare them directly.
This suggests that political orientation is partly downstream of something more basic: how comfortable a person is with novelty, ambiguity, and questioning received values. That comfort is what Openness measures.
What is doing the work
A few mechanisms keep showing up in the research.
Tolerance for ambiguity. People low in Openness tend to prefer clear categories, settled answers, and tested approaches. That preference can pull toward political positions that emphasize tradition, order, and known institutions 4. People high in Openness sit more easily with unsettled questions, which can pull toward positions that emphasize change and experimentation.
Appetite for difference. Openness includes an attraction to unfamiliar people, ideas, and ways of living. Positions on immigration, cultural change, and social diversity track this appetite closely.
Openness to revising values. One of the six Openness facets is literally "Values" — willingness to question received beliefs. People high on this facet are more likely to update their political views over a lifetime, in either direction.
Sensitivity to threat. People low in Openness, especially when combined with higher Neuroticism, tend to be more responsive to threat cues. Some research suggests this sensitivity helps explain the link between low Openness and more security-oriented political positions 4.
What the finding does not mean
This is where careful reading matters most.
It does not mean high-Openness people are smarter. Openness and IQ correlate only modestly. A high-Openness person is not necessarily right about politics. They are tilted toward a particular kind of position by a particular trait. So is everyone else.
It does not mean low-Openness people are closed-minded. Low Openness is a stronger prior on what has worked. It is not a refusal to update. Plenty of low-Openness people hold their political positions thoughtfully, and plenty change their minds in response to evidence.
It does not mean political views are fixed at birth. Openness is partly heritable, but only partly. Life experience, social context, and deliberate reflection all shape political views, and the Openness-politics link explains a slice of the variance, not all of it.
It does not mean the trait determines your vote. The correlation is a tendency, not a rule. A high-Openness conservative and a low-Openness liberal are both common. The trait nudges the odds. It does not decide the ballot.
Why the effect is bigger than IQ's
The intuition most people start with is that smart people figure out the right politics. The data does not support that picture, in either direction.
A few reasons the trait effect tends to be larger than the intelligence effect:
Politics is about values, not just facts. Most political disagreements bottom out in different priorities — order versus change, security versus freedom, tradition versus reform. These are value differences, not knowledge differences. Openness directly measures appetite for change and revision. IQ does not.
Smart people on both sides argue better, not differently. Higher intelligence tends to be associated with more sophisticated reasoning in defense of whatever position a person already holds. It does not consistently pull people toward one side 5.
The trait is upstream of the question. By the time someone is forming a political view, Openness has already shaped what they find appealing, what they find threatening, and which institutions they trust. Intelligence shapes the elaboration, not the starting tilt.
What this means for self-knowledge
If your Openness is on the higher end and you tend to hold socially liberal positions, it is worth noticing that part of why those positions feel obviously right may be the trait, not the argument. The same is true if your Openness is on the lower end and conservative positions feel obviously right.
This is not an argument for relativism. Some positions are better supported than others. It is an argument for noticing where the floor of your own certainty actually sits, and treating people on the other side as people whose defaults are differently calibrated rather than people who are missing something obvious.
The strongest political thinkers across the spectrum tend to share one quality: they take seriously the possibility that their starting tilt is doing some of the work, and they argue from positions they have actually stress-tested against the opposite view.
How to read your own Openness score with this in mind
The Openness score in your Defaults report tells you where your appetite for the new sits relative to other people. It does not tell you what your politics should be.
What it can do: help you notice when "this position feels obviously right" is partly the trait talking, and when a disagreement with someone on the other side is less about facts and more about a different default for how comfortable each of you is with change.
Take the free Big Five assessment → to see your Openness score and the six facets that drive it.
References
Footnotes
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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 ↩ ↩2
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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 ↩
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Sibley, C. G., & Duckitt, J. (2008). Personality and prejudice: A meta-analysis and theoretical review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(3), 248–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868308319226 ↩
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Jost, J. T., Glaser, J., Kruglanski, A. W., & Sulloway, F. J. (2003). Political conservatism as motivated social cognition. Psychological Bulletin, 129(3), 339–375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.129.3.339 ↩ ↩2
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Kahan, D. M. (2013). Ideology, motivated reasoning, and cognitive reflection. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1930297500005271 ↩