Does politics reflect personality?

A new article in Psychology Today suggests the following:

†¢    Liberals are messier than conservatives. Their rooms have more clutter, more color.  Conservatives’ rooms are better organized, more brightly lit, and more conventional.  Liberals have more books and their books are on a greater variety of topics.
†¢    Compared to liberals, conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity, a trait researchers say is exemplified when George Bush says things like, "Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. My job is to tell people what I think," and "I’m the decider."
†¢    Conservatives have a greater fear of death.
†¢    Liberals are higher on openness, which includes intellectual curiosity, excitement-seeking, novelty, creativity for its own sake, and a craving for stimulation like travel, color, art, music, and literature.
†¢    Conservatives are higher on conscientiousness, which includes neatness, rule-following, duty, and orderliness.
†¢    Conservatives have a greater need to reach a decision quickly and stick to it.
†¢    When people are prompted to think about death–a state of mind  psychologists call mortality salience–they actually become more conservative.
†¢    Conservatives are more likely to have been insecure as kids, whereas liberals are more likely to have been confident as kids.

I can assure you my room is messy, and I wonder if more finely grained categories would have been useful.

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