Over the last few weeks, I have been developing a theory as to the psychology of political affiliation, and today, I finally feel confident enough in it to commit it to blogspace. Please forgive me if this theory is a little wet behind the ears, it’s still a newborn.

For those of us with a keen interest in both psychology and politics, one of the eternally recurring questions is the simple question of the origin of political beliefs. What makes one person a liberal, and another a conservative? There are a lot of potential answers, and it is quite easy to fall into moralistic judgment and say “Well it’s easy. Some people are good, and others are evil. ” But serious thinkers and armchair psychologists cannot possibly be satisfied by such a simplistic reduction. What really makes one person lean to the left when another leans to the right?

I don’t claim to have a single definitive answer, but I think, in my ponderings, I may have unearthed a useful axis along which to examine the question.

It all comes down to which is more difficult to tolerate for the individual : uncertainty, or cognitive dissonance.

From this point of view, a liberal is someone who finds the internal conflict of cognitive dissonance to be far more unpleasant than any sense of ambiguity or doubt about the true nature of things. Hence, a liberal tolerates doubt but rigorously pursues the elimination of cognitive dissonance by trying to form a single, coherent, internally and externally consistent picture of the world and how it works.

A conservative, on the other hand, finds ambiguity, uncertainty, and doubt to be far more painful and frightening than cognitive dissonance. Because of this, they are willing to tolerate a great deal of cognitive dissonance in order to create a world view free of the doubt and uncertainty and perplexing complexity that they cannot tolerate. Their world-view need not be particularly consistent or congruent either with itself or with objective reality, as long as it fulfills the deep need for certainty.

Liberal versus conservative, then, is really a battle between two thinking styles, or rather, two different cognitive priorities. Liberals maximize consistency and minimize dissonance. Conservatives, the opposite.

This view, I think, helps to shed some light on the age-old observation that people tend to be more liberal when they are younger and more conservative as they grow older.

When we are young, we are in the phase of our lives when we are still trying to figure out what this world is all about, what is really going on, and what it all means. Our minds retain the flexibility of youth as well as its vigor, and we have not made a great deal of commitments, either to ourselves or to the world. as to the nature of things or the ways of the world. Most importantly, we have, for the most part, not made any substantial investments of time, energy, or wealth based on our views, and therefore the pressure to cling to the philosophies in which we have invested is absent.

As we age, however, things change. The progress from single adult to spouse to parent leaves us with a great deal more in the immediate world to concentrate on, and the increased drain of day to day life on our faculties coupled with the inevitable decline in vigour and mental flexibility that comes with age, leaves little room in people’s minds for philosophical meanderings. When there is so much to do in the course of the day, you have to make up your mind about certain things and simply go with it, come what may, and over time this leads to both the aforementioned increased investment in one worldview or another, and a lack of patience with the sorts of ambiguities a more philosophically inclined mind embraces.

Eventually, the fog of age grows thick enough in the minds of the aging to create significant pressure to reduce and strengthen the world view even further. Previously acceptable levels of ambiguity become intolerable because the more confused and frightened people grow as their faculties dim, the stronger the need for absolute rigidity and certainty in the remaining things they can still understand.

Thus, over the course of their lives, a person moves from a child’s simple, black and white, largely unexamined world view to the troubling turbulence of their teen years, when the child that was wars with the adult that will be, into a certain equilibrium as a young adult, then into the middle years of declining energies and flexibility, into the long dark tunnel of old age, where the emotional need for certainty far outstrips any need for philosophical clarity and the mind retreats back into the simplistic black and white view it remembers from its innocent youth.

I make no claims as to this theory’s completeness or comprehensibility. I only offer it as another angle from which to examine the question, and hence derive a better picture of the whole.