Conservatism and Liberalism in College Students

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to examine, in this time of political turmoil, how those who call themselves conservative differ from those who call themselves liberal in terms of attitudes and personality traits. Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1960) defines a conservative as tending to preserve established traditions or institutions and to resist or oppose any changes in these. A liberal, on the other hand, is defined as favoring reform, open-minded to ideas that challenge tradition. A series of attitudes were measured, using Ratter's Internal-External Control Scale (1966) (I-E scale), an index of how much control a person feels he has over outcome of events, and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC-SD; 1964), a measure of need for social approval. From the definitions above, it was predicted that conservatives would be more in favor of individuals and not the federal government providing bomb shelters, of stricter discipline of children and of individuals supporting themselves in college; liberals would be more in favor of racial integration of neighborhoods, of women making careers for themselves, of social welfare, and of halting the nuclear arms race. The patterning of the I-E scale and the MC-SD scale scores could not be predicted for liberals and conservatives. The two attitude scales were administered to 100 students in an abnormal psychology class, 84 of whom were males. A rating scale given earlier had identified 50 liberals and 50 conservatives. When mean scores1 were compared by t tests, conservatives differed from liberals in the predicted direction on attitudes, excluding undergraduates getting married and having financial support in college. Conservatives were significantly higher than liberals on the MC-SD scale. As all differences were at the .05 level, there seem to be consistent attitudinal and personality trait differences berween liberals and conservatives who are college age students. Whether this is age-related and dependent upon parental attitudes and characteristics should be investigated. Understanding the meaning of the observed differences, e.g., social approval may indicate that conservatives are more interested in presenting favorable social pictures of themselves, requires further research.