In previous essays I’ve quoted Stephen Nowicki’s book Choice or Chance: Understanding Your Locus of Control and Why It Matters, which describes the psychological concept of “locus of control,” a concept designed to describe the degree to which we expect what happens to us, good or bad, is connected to our behavior. Various data show that those with a more internal locus of control tend to be happier than those with a more external locus of control. But what of its effects on political outlooks?
Professor Nowicki gave a lecture on the subject of locus of control and was asked (at the 1:15:45 second mark) “Do you think there’s any relationship between internal and external and political orientation?” Nowicki responded, “Believe it or not, the most internal people are white Republican males. That’s just what the data are.” I tend to believe it.
Liberals are more than twice as likely as conservatives to be found to have a mental health condition.
It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to be more mentally ill than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey. A search found 5 items measuring one’s own mental illness in different ways (e.g. ”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”). All of these items were associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report. These results held up mostly in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data, the difference in mental illness between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d. This finding is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs.
The data shows that ideology, race and gender are all statistically significant predictors of self-reported mental health, with liberals having the worst self-reported mental health compared to moderates and conservatives, and women having worse self-reported mental health than men. What’s more, the interaction between race, ideology, and gender is statistically significant — with liberal white and non-white women having the worst self-reported mental health. This trend has also been reported by Zach Goldberg and Haidt using Pew Research’s data, as well as findings from Gimbrone et al … [A]s students move further to the left, they are more likely to have poor mental health — suggesting that it’s not just liberal ideology that impacts mental health, but also the extremity of their beliefs. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests show ideology is a statistically significant predictor of mental health. Post-hoc tests demonstrate it predicts in the direction as shown: more liberal, worse mental health.
We analyzed nationally-representative data from 2005 to 2018 Monitoring the Future annual cross-sectional samples of 12th-grade students (N = 86,138). We examined self-reported political beliefs, sex, and parental education as predictors of four internalizing symptom scales over time, including depressive affect. From 2005 to 2018, 19.8% of students identified as liberal and 18.1% identified as conservative, with little change over time. Depressive affect (DA) scores increased for all adolescents after 2010, but increases were most pronounced for female liberal adolescents (b for interaction = 0.17, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.32), and scores were highest overall for female liberal adolescents with low parental education (Mean DA 2010: 2.02, SD 0.81/2018: 2.75, SD 0.92). Findings were consistent across multiple internalizing symptoms outcomes. Trends in adolescent internalizing symptoms diverged by political beliefs, sex, and parental education over time, with female liberal adolescents experiencing the largest increases in depressive symptoms, especially in the context of demographic risk factors including parental education. These findings indicate a growing mental health disparity between adolescents who identify with certain political beliefs.
Researchers have found that campaigns that tend to associate general distress with depression and other mental disorders can actually produce those disorders where they didn’t exist before:
[A]wareness efforts are leading some individuals to interpret and report milder forms of distress as mental health problems. We propose that this then leads some individuals to experience a genuine increase in symptoms, because labelling distress as a mental health problem can affect an individual's self-concept and behaviour in a way that is ultimately self-fulfilling. For example, interpreting low levels of anxiety as symptomatic of an anxiety disorder might lead to behavioural avoidance, which can further exacerbate anxiety symptoms. We propose that the increase in reported symptoms then drives further awareness efforts: the two processes influence each other in a cyclical, intensifying manner.
People who keep hearing about new mental-health terminology—from their friends, from their family, from social-media influencers [or their schools]—start processing normal levels of anxiety as perilous signs of their own pathology. “If people are repeatedly told that mental health problems are common and that they might experience them … they might start to interpret any negative thoughts and feelings through this lens,” [Lucy] Foulkes and [Jack] Andrews wrote. This can create a self-fulfilling spiral: More anxiety diagnoses lead to more hypervigilance among young people about their anxiety, which leads to more withdrawal from everyday activities, which creates actual anxiety and depression, which leads to more diagnoses, and so on.
People in Southern states tend to be more Republican, and, consistent with the above data, researchers have found that “regional psychological differences are robust and can reliably be studied across countries and spatial levels,” and those results show that residents of Southern States generally rank highest on the psychological traits of extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability.
The legal profession in California and Washington, D.C. is dominated by people generally aligned with the Democratic Party, and when researchers examined lawyers in Washington, D.C. and California they found the following:
Rates of mental illness and heavy alcohol use are exceedingly high in the legal profession, while attrition among women has also been a longstanding problem … Data were collected from 2,863 lawyers randomly sampled from the California Lawyers Association and D.C. Bar … Findings indicated that the prevalence and severity of depression, anxiety, stress, and risky/hazardous drinking were significantly higher among women. Further, one-quarter of all women contemplated leaving the profession due to mental health concerns, compared to 17% of men.
Younger people have always tended to be of a politically liberal orientation, at least in more modern times, and at the same time there’s been an increase in depressive symptoms among high school students.
There has also been an increase in the suicide rate among young people even as the homicide rate among young people has declined.
As if in synch, popular music appears to have gotten sadder and angrier over the years.
Interestingly, the general trend toward depression among high schoolers is less pronounced among those who live in rural and suburban areas, which tend to be less liberal politically.
Entering college students have, in turn, increasingly reported mental health issues.
Many of these young people go on to become some of the most influential activists in Democratic Party politics.
The harmful focus on an external locus of control has even worked its way into presidential rhetoric. Democratic President Joe Biden, when referring to America, has replaced the phrase "land of opportunity" with "land of possibility." While the former connotes the sort of "seize the opportunity" mindset associated with the beneficial internal locus of control, the latter connotes the sort of "life is a crap shoot subject mainly to outside forces" mindset associated with the more harmful external locus of control.
Also, letting constant distractions (including those caused by social media that perpetuate feelings of an external locus of control) prevent people from taking time out to process their thoughts can perpetuate negative thoughts and emotions. As Julian Adorney and Mark Johnson write:
[A] way to reduce conflict is to take some time away from the conflict to breathe. As psychologist Chris Ferguson explained to us in an interview, doing this can help us to calm down and not fly off the handle at small conflicts. Ferguson explains that "there are two related issues here…emotional responses usually peak immediately after a stressor, then lessen with time, and, second, emotional responses tend to impair problem-solving." "Thus," he argues, "you see people have a bad emotional response, impulsively do something stupid, only to later acknowledge how stupid it was." When we pause and take time to process, we can "evaluate if the situation is really as bad as we initially thought it was" and calibrate our response from there ... In ages past, humans had lots of idle time. We fished, sharpened spears, tended fires, repaired nets, and performed other physical activities that kept our hands busy while leaving our minds free to process the events of the day. By contrast, in the modern world, we have little to no idle time. Every spare minute is filled with distractions: we listen to podcasts, read books, text friends, and check social media ten thousand times per day. As a result, we never actually process our emotions and work through them.
One anecdote in concluding this series. Last March a neighbor let me know about a free book giveaway that was being run in someone’s front yard. I went up to check it out and there were around a dozen tables and many more boxes filled with books that people were looking through on the lawn. I thanked the people running it and took a few books for myself. But I was struck by the immense volume of books whose themes focused on all the negatives in America’s history, to the apparent exclusion of any bright side. There were many hundreds of these books, all with the sort of “antiracist” focus embodied by the New York Times bestselling books of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin Diangelo, or similar oppression-focused narratives. My neighbor and I shared the titles of the books we’d taken for ourselves, and then my neighbor said he spoke to the people running the give-away. They said the books had been owned by someone who committed suicide.
In many ways we live out our lives under a narrative structure of our own choosing. So we should all make sure we’re considering as much context as possible before settling on a negative narrative that may not only be based on false assumptions, but also have tragic consequences.
