Conservative Self-Enhancement

Abstract

Political conservatism has been linked to motivated forms of social cognition, sensitivity to threat, and defensive cognitive styles. The present research examined whether liberal-conservative political ideology was associated with self-enhancement using large Internet samples across eight studies (N=13,002). Meta-analysis of these results revealed that the tendency to make overly positive self-evaluations was positively associated with general political conservatism, social conservatism, economic conservatism, and conservative patterns of moral foundation endorsement (.12 ≤ rrandom ≤ .13; .07 ≤ rfixed ≤ .10), even after controlling for key demographic variables (.08 ≤ rrandom ≤ .16; .03 ≤ rfixed ≤ .09). These findings suggest that, above and beyond previously studied variables, multiple forms of political conservatism predict a strengthened tendency to evaluate the self in an overly positive way.

Keywords: political ideology, self-enhancement, meta-analysis