Conservative or Liberal ? Worksplace Reveals All

Jolie Rouge · 09-25-2008, 05:36 PM

Conservative or Liberal ? Worksplace Reveals All
Jeanna Bryner - Senior Writer LiveScience.com
Thu Sep 25, 8:46 AM ET[/i]

Your office or bedroom holds telltale signs of whether you are a conservative or a liberal, finds a new study. While political conservatives tend to keep a tidy, organized office, political liberals favor colorful, more stylish but cluttered spaces.

A person may hide their political ideology from others, including from pollsters, but the researchers were delighted to learn that a peek into subjects' living quarters or even workspaces could give that away.

Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct "behavioral residue" that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study by New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. The results are set for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Political Psychology.

Office snoops

The researchers took inventory of five office locations - a commercial real estate agency, an advertising agency, a business school, an architectural firm and a retail bank - all in a large U.S. city. They had observers check out the workspaces of 94 male and female employees. The subjects' average age was 37. The snoopers had no idea of the workers' political orientation.

Political orientation was measured with survey questions.

Liberals' offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives' offices, Jost said.

The researchers also sent snoopers into the living spaces of 76 undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving at similar results.

"Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration," Jost said during a panel discussion on "The Neuroscience of Elections and Human Decision-Making" at NYU, adding: "Conservatives' rooms were rated by independent raters as better organized and tidier in general."

Specifically, individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets.

Liberals' rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general.

Political personalities

The findings agreed with a link found by Jost's team between two personality traits and political ideology. In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.

Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.

"I think it's a truly fascinating possibility that the left-right distinction, which emerged over 200 years ago in response to the French Revolution and continues to be the single best way of understanding ideological differences today, may be rooted in fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," Jost told LiveScience.

(The terms of left-right political leanings was originally based on the seating arrangement of those in the French parliament during the time of the French Revolution.)

He added, "It may be that conflicting tendencies in human nature play themselves out in the political sphere as the struggle between right and left."

But for a self-proclaimed conservative or liberal whose office conditions do not match these findings, say a conservative living in a cluttered room, Jost said, that's to be expected.

"What we have observed are just differences on average between liberals and conservatives, and the variability around these averages is considerable," he said, giving the example that while on average men are taller than women, plenty of tall women and short men are walking around.

He added, "But I do wonder whether conservatives with messy rooms feel worse about the mess than do liberals with messy rooms, again, on average. For conservatives, it may be more likely that they are failing to live up to their own norms with regard to conscientiousness."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...hlvSmXiNWs0NUE

Jolie Rouge · 09-25-2008, 05:39 PM

Office Emails Loaded with Lies
Robert Roy Britt -- LiveScience Managing Editor
Thu Sep 25, 1:31 PM ET

Office emails are more loaded with lies than traditional written communications like pen and paper, new research suggests. Previous research has supported this notion, also finding that phone calls are even more packed with prevarication.

A pair of new studies indicates email in the workplace is more deceptive than old fashioned writing, and that people feel quite justified in their distortions. "There is a growing concern in the workplace over email communications, and it comes down to trust," said Liuba Belkin, co-author of the studies and an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University. "You're not afforded the luxury of seeing nonverbal and behavioral cues over email. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception."

In one study, the researchers gave 48 full-time MBA students $89 to divide between themselves and another fictional party, who only knew the dollar amount fell somewhere between $5 and $100. There was one pre-condition: the other party had to accept whatever offer was made to them. Using either email or pen-and-paper communications, the MBA students reported the size of the pot - truthful or not - and how much the other party would get.

Lying was rampant in all situations. But students using email lied about the amount of money to be divided more than 92 percent of the time, while less then 64 percent lied when writing by hand.

A second study of 69 full-time MBA students found that the more familiar emailers are with each other, the less deceptive they tend to be. They still lied, however.

The research, presented recently at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, adds to mounting evidence of emailing's pitfalls. Among them: harsher words than we wrote in the old days. "These findings are consistent with our other work that shows that email communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations, all as opposed to pen-and-paper systems," said co-author Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University. "People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing."

Email may not be the worst way to go, however.

A small study in 2004 by Jeff Hancock of Cornell University, involving 30 university students who were asked to keep a communications journal for a week, found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The participants fessed up to the researchers for the sake of the study. They lied in 14 percent of emails, 21 percent of instant messages, 27 percent of face-to-face interactions and 37 percent of phone calls.

Researchers generally believe that lies are related to self-esteem. We want to look good. But the workplace seems to be a den of dishonesty. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2006 found that people are willing to lie to those they know, and in fact we are "more likely to muddle the truth with our coworkers than with perfect strangers."

"We want to both look good when we are in the company of others (especially people we care about), and we want to protect our self-worth," said the leader of that study, Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta.

Interestingly, fudging the facts is a more serious problem at non-profits, according to David Shulman, author of "From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace" (ILR Press, 2006). The reason, Shulman figures, is that nonprofits tend to struggle more than for-profit corporations, "which may lead to deception to survive and serve a mission."

Earlier this year, Shulman summarized his findings in an article for the International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law. "Small size, meager resources, and greater discretion for managers may encourage greater deception" in non-profits, he writes. "An exacerbating factor is that nonprofits are moral entrepreneurs, so deceptions can often be morally rationalized."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...Vt XgOpuzvtEF

speedygirl · 09-25-2008, 05:41 PM

That's interesting and pretty close to how I am. The only difference is that I tend to keep things orderly in my office (friends think I'm too anal about neatness, lol) but I do have an eclectic group of items on my desk.

LuvBigRip · 09-25-2008, 05:44 PM

LOL...I am politically conservative, but you would not know it from my office.

dangerousfem · 09-25-2008, 06:05 PM

wrong on my account..lol.. I am very conservative.. but tend to be sloppy..lol.. and love colorful places.. or leopard print..LOL

stresseater · 09-25-2008, 09:20 PM

Ditto to being wrong on my part as well. I am a total mess and have a lot of characteristics that are VERY unconservitive. I literally live in a shack that always looks like a tornado has blown thru it.

atprm · 09-25-2008, 09:58 PM

add me to the list of wrong --

I am very conservative and sloppier than hell.

I consider any day where I get the urge to clean off to find my desk, as a scene from a movie with a Treasure Hunt in it--

by the time I see my desk, I have already said "aha, ooo!, well, well well!" and several other phrases many times.

LOL

It's always an exciting event!

09-25-2008, 05:36 PM	#1 (permalink)
Jolie Rouge C & P Queen Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Missin' Mesue ... Posts: 33,955 iTrader: (2) Thanks: 737 Thanked 1,401 Times in 761 Posts	Conservative or Liberal ? Worksplace Reveals All Conservative or Liberal ? Worksplace Reveals All Jeanna Bryner - Senior Writer LiveScience.com Thu Sep 25, 8:46 AM ET[/i] Your office or bedroom holds telltale signs of whether you are a conservative or a liberal, finds a new study. While political conservatives tend to keep a tidy, organized office, political liberals favor colorful, more stylish but cluttered spaces. A person may hide their political ideology from others, including from pollsters, but the researchers were delighted to learn that a peek into subjects' living quarters or even workspaces could give that away. Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct "behavioral residue" that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers, according to the study by New York University psychologist John Jost and his colleagues. The results are set for publication in a forthcoming issue of the journal Political Psychology. Office snoops The researchers took inventory of five office locations - a commercial real estate agency, an advertising agency, a business school, an architectural firm and a retail bank - all in a large U.S. city. They had observers check out the workspaces of 94 male and female employees. The subjects' average age was 37. The snoopers had no idea of the workers' political orientation. Political orientation was measured with survey questions. Liberals' offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives' offices, Jost said. The researchers also sent snoopers into the living spaces of 76 undergraduates at the University of California, Berkeley, arriving at similar results. "Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration," Jost said during a panel discussion on "The Neuroscience of Elections and Human Decision-Making" at NYU, adding: "Conservatives' rooms were rated by independent raters as better organized and tidier in general." Specifically, individuals who reported a more conservative ideology also had bedrooms that contained more organizational and cleaning supplies, including calendars, postage stamps, ironing boards and laundry baskets. Liberals' rooms on the other hand were marked by more clutter, including more CDs, a greater variety of CDs, a greater variety of books and more color in the room in general. Political personalities The findings agreed with a link found by Jost's team between two personality traits and political ideology. In personality tests of thousands of college students, Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful. Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following. "I think it's a truly fascinating possibility that the left-right distinction, which emerged over 200 years ago in response to the French Revolution and continues to be the single best way of understanding ideological differences today, may be rooted in fundamental human needs for stability vs. change, order vs. complexity, familiarity vs. novelty, conformity vs. creativity, and loyalty vs. rebellion," Jost told LiveScience. (The terms of left-right political leanings was originally based on the seating arrangement of those in the French parliament during the time of the French Revolution.) He added, "It may be that conflicting tendencies in human nature play themselves out in the political sphere as the struggle between right and left." But for a self-proclaimed conservative or liberal whose office conditions do not match these findings, say a conservative living in a cluttered room, Jost said, that's to be expected. "What we have observed are just differences on average between liberals and conservatives, and the variability around these averages is considerable," he said, giving the example that while on average men are taller than women, plenty of tall women and short men are walking around. He added, "But I do wonder whether conservatives with messy rooms feel worse about the mess than do liberals with messy rooms, again, on average. For conservatives, it may be more likely that they are failing to live up to their own norms with regard to conscientiousness." http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...hlvSmXiNWs0NUE __________________ Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT!** Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

09-25-2008, 05:39 PM	#2 (permalink)
Jolie Rouge C & P Queen Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Missin' Mesue ... Posts: 33,955 iTrader: (2) Thanks: 737 Thanked 1,401 Times in 761 Posts	Office Emails Loaded with Lies Robert Roy Britt -- LiveScience Managing Editor Thu Sep 25, 1:31 PM ET Office emails are more loaded with lies than traditional written communications like pen and paper, new research suggests. Previous research has supported this notion, also finding that phone calls are even more packed with prevarication. A pair of new studies indicates email in the workplace is more deceptive than old fashioned writing, and that people feel quite justified in their distortions. "There is a growing concern in the workplace over email communications, and it comes down to trust," said Liuba Belkin, co-author of the studies and an assistant professor of management at Lehigh University. "You're not afforded the luxury of seeing nonverbal and behavioral cues over email. And in an organizational context, that leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation and, as we saw in our study, intentional deception." In one study, the researchers gave 48 full-time MBA students $89 to divide between themselves and another fictional party, who only knew the dollar amount fell somewhere between $5 and $100. There was one pre-condition: the other party had to accept whatever offer was made to them. Using either email or pen-and-paper communications, the MBA students reported the size of the pot - truthful or not - and how much the other party would get. Lying was rampant in all situations. But students using email lied about the amount of money to be divided more than 92 percent of the time, while less then 64 percent lied when writing by hand. A second study of 69 full-time MBA students found that the more familiar emailers are with each other, the less deceptive they tend to be. They still lied, however. The research, presented recently at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, adds to mounting evidence of emailing's pitfalls. Among them: harsher words than we wrote in the old days. "These findings are consistent with our other work that shows that email communication decreases the amount of trust and cooperation we see in professional group-work, and increases the negativity in performance evaluations, all as opposed to pen-and-paper systems," said co-author Terri Kurtzberg of Rutgers University. "People seem to feel more justified in acting in self-serving ways when typing as opposed to writing." Email may not be the worst way to go, however. A small study in 2004 by Jeff Hancock of Cornell University, involving 30 university students who were asked to keep a communications journal for a week, found that people are twice as likely to tell lies in phone conversations as they are in emails. The participants fessed up to the researchers for the sake of the study. They lied in 14 percent of emails, 21 percent of instant messages, 27 percent of face-to-face interactions and 37 percent of phone calls. Researchers generally believe that lies are related to self-esteem. We want to look good. But the workplace seems to be a den of dishonesty. A study in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2006 found that people are willing to lie to those they know, and in fact we are "more likely to muddle the truth with our coworkers than with perfect strangers." "We want to both look good when we are in the company of others (especially people we care about), and we want to protect our self-worth," said the leader of that study, Jennifer Argo of the University of Alberta. Interestingly, fudging the facts is a more serious problem at non-profits, according to David Shulman, author of "From Hire to Liar: The Role of Deception in the Workplace" (ILR Press, 2006). The reason, Shulman figures, is that nonprofits tend to struggle more than for-profit corporations, "which may lead to deception to survive and serve a mission." Earlier this year, Shulman summarized his findings in an article for the International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law. "Small size, meager resources, and greater discretion for managers may encourage greater deception" in non-profits, he writes. "An exacerbating factor is that nonprofits are moral entrepreneurs, so deceptions can often be morally rationalized." http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/...Vt XgOpuzvtEF __________________ Laissez les bon temps rouler! Going to church doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage makes you a car. a 4 day work week & sex slaves ~ I say Tyt for PRESIDENT!** Not to be taken internally, literally or seriously ....Suki ebaynni IS THAT BETTER ?

09-25-2008, 05:41 PM	#3 (permalink)
speedygirl Mass-hole Patrol Join Date: Apr 2006 Location: New England Posts: 3,956 iTrader: (0) Thanks: 1,488 Thanked 2,160 Times in 1,183 Posts	That's interesting and pretty close to how I am. The only difference is that I tend to keep things orderly in my office (friends think I'm too anal about neatness, lol) but I do have an eclectic group of items on my desk. __________________ "A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public opinion."

09-25-2008, 05:44 PM	#4 (permalink)
LuvBigRip I loves my puppeh! Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Purple Mountains Majesty Posts: 4,546 iTrader: (26) Thanks: 416 Thanked 1,578 Times in 534 Posts	LOL...I am politically conservative, but you would not know it from my office. __________________ It all goes downhill from here

09-25-2008, 06:05 PM	#5 (permalink)
dangerousfem Proud Navy Mom! Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: On The Edge Of Sanity Posts: 5,600 iTrader: (22) Thanks: 573 Thanked 673 Times in 367 Posts	wrong on my account..lol.. I am very conservative.. but tend to be sloppy..lol.. and love colorful places.. or leopard print..LOL __________________ I'm not from the south...but I got here as fast as I could!

09-25-2008, 09:20 PM	#6 (permalink)
stresseater Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Birthplace of the Boonies Rural Oklahoma Posts: 2,474 iTrader: (0) Thanks: 246 Thanked 85 Times in 57 Posts	Ditto to being wrong on my part as well. I am a total mess and have a lot of characteristics that are VERY unconservitive. I literally live in a shack that always looks like a tornado has blown thru it. __________________ **** The views and opinions stated by kids=stress are simply that. Views and opinions. They are not meant to slam anyone else or their views.To anyone whom I may have offended by this expression of my humble opinion, I hereby recognized and appologized to you publically.

09-25-2008, 09:58 PM	#7 (permalink)
atprm hoarding glade candles Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: in a pineapple under the sea Posts: 4,824 iTrader: (14) Thanks: 229 Thanked 1,624 Times in 838 Posts	add me to the list of wrong -- I am very conservative and sloppier than hell. I consider any day where I get the urge to clean off to find my desk, as a scene from a movie with a Treasure Hunt in it-- by the time I see my desk, I have already said "aha, ooo!, well, well well!" and several other phrases many times. LOL It's always an exciting event! __________________ to my dh: share everything sans your sinus infection, your flu or your cold -- no need to regift.

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