Conservative or Liberal? Workspace Reveals All
LiveScience.com Thu Sep 25,
Your office or bedroom holds telltale signs of whether you are a conservative or a liberal, finds a new study.
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.
The researchers took inventory of five office locations..........
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: 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.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080925/sc_livescience/conservativeorliberalworkspacerevealsall
: Boring, but clean. And they like to follow rules. 
: Untidy pigs, but imaginitive, interesting, and insightful.