Conservatives are jack-booted thugs, marching in lock-step with the evil Koch brothers to the tune of their authoritarian pied piper. Leftists, by contrast, are free-thinkers, always there for the little guy. Ummm...not so much.
Conservatives, many people will tell you, like authority. They like the idea of someone telling them what to do, lest society break down into chaos. Liberals, on the other hand, are a bit more skeptical of authority and quick to challenge it. But a new paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that this common belief is wrong — that liberals and conservatives have the same views on authority, but differ only when it comes to what kinds of authority they respect.
Basically, it seems that we're wired in very similar fashion, but it depends on where we fall along the ideological spectrum. In broad terms, conservatives tend to aggregate along well-established social norms, while Leftists tend to go for the laughs generated by mocking and denigration. Conservatives, for example, may be drawn toward people like Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin, while leftists prefer the likes of Jon Stewart and Tina Fey.
