Jordan Peterson describes how the Big 5 personality traits help to explain the differences between conservatives and liberals
“… You know also if you think about politics from a temperamental perspective it gets to be extraordinarily useful. So, if you are conservative, you’re high in conscientiousness, particularly orderliness, and you’re low in openness.
Okay, so what good are you? Well, you’re not great if you had to have a wonderful philosophical conversation about ideas and then go head an art movie. It’s like, no, conservatives you’re wrong date for that particular bit of business. But if you want someone to run a company that’s already been established or to make sure that algorithmized processes are being undertaken properly, you want to service — they’re very good at managing and they’re very good at administering. Conscientiousness is the best predictor of those two domains, apart from IQ.
Okay so fine. What do you need the damn liberals for? Well, you don’t want them running anything. [laughter] But you want them thinking up new things because the entrepreneurs and artists are high in openness and low in conscientiousness especially orderliness, and they have to be, because if you’re starting something new you don’t want to have everything in the neat little boxes. You have to break rules. You have to take things apart.
And so, the liberals need the conservatives to run enterprises and the conservatives need the liberals to start them. And it makes sense from a temperamental perspective if you think about it, too, because there’s five basic personality dimensions. They’re all normally distributed and that implies is that there’s a niche for every personality type in proportion to the frequency of that of the occurrence within that normal distribution.
There’s some places for really extroverted people. There’s more places for people who are moderately extroverted and moderately introverted. But there are places for everyone in that dimensional structure. And there’s utility for all of those people. And so that’s why you have to keep the dialogue going.
It’s like if you’re hyper liberal you have to talk to the damn conservatives, because sometimes, they’re right. Sometimes you’re right. But sometimes they’re right. And so if you don’t talk then the system tilts off to the — to the extreme that’s represented by the temperament. And so what you’d have is a bunch of liberals talking about new things while the buildings were falling down around them.
So, we need each other and that’s seems part of what’s happened in the West is we figured that out a long time ago we figured out — oh well yeah, I’ve got to talk to those stupid people who don’t think the way you do, because sometimes despite the fact that they’re annoying, and nowhere near as smart as you, they’re actually correct.
And so, here’s another way of thinking about it. Imagine the environment does this like a snake, it’s always moving, right, you don’t know where that damn things going, and you want to be in the middle — it’s like two cliffs, they keep shifting — you want to be in the middle far from the cliffs. It keeps moving around, and you’re trying to walk forward. Well sometimes it’s over here, so the conservatives they have to pull it back, and sometimes it’s over here so the liberals they have to pull it back. And, but, because it keeps changing you don’t know who’s right. And so you have to keep talking.
And that’s what a Democratic Society actually allows for. Exchange the opinions, move the damn polity, so that we can stay in the middle of the snake roughly speaking. And so, you’ve got to have some respect for people who aren’t like you. They’re actually not like you.
So I figured out recently, I think that, I couldn’t figure out why openness and conscientiousness are the dimensions that are determining political beliefs, because they’re not even correlated. So why the hell do they clump for political belief. And I think I figured it out.
I think it’s because of a borders. I think the fundamental political issue is how open versus closed borders should be. And I don’t just mean borders between states. I mean borders between states. I mean orders between institutions, borders between genders, borders between sexes, borders between ideas.
The conservatives say keep everything where it belongs cuz it’s working. And the liberals say, yeah, it’s working for now but unless we make some adjustments it’s not to keep working. And they’re both right. So, we better have the dialogue, because otherwise we wander off the cliff, on the left or the right, and we know where that goes, that goes there’s flames down at the bottom of those cliffs. And people die horribly down there. And we’ve seen that on the right and the left. We’ve had plenty of evidence for that.”
