Why people will vote against their own interests--

[Jackpine Radical]

We are often perplexed by people whose voting patterns seem to consistently run counter to their own good--why poor southerners vote for the most regressive Republicans, for example.

As a partial explanation of this phenomenon, I offer the following link. It's making the rounds on the psychology listserves this morning.


http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/science/spite-is-good-spite-works.html?from=homepage


Spite Is Good. Spite Works.

By NATALIE ANGIER
March 31, 2014

Reporting in February in the journal Psychological Assessment, Dr. Marcus and his colleagues presented the preliminary results from their new “spitefulness scale,” a 17-item survey they created to assess individual differences in spitefulness, just as existing personality tests measure traits like agreeableness and extroversion.

A total of 946 college students and 297 adults were asked to rate how firmly they agreed with sentiments like “If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her” or “If I opposed the election of an official, I would happily see the person fail even if that failure hurt my community” or “I would be willing to take a punch if it meant someone I did not like would receive two punches.”

…

From the survey and related experiments, the researchers determined that men were generally more spiteful than women and young adults more spiteful than older ones, and that spitefulness generally cohabited with traits like callousness, Machiavellianism and poor self-esteem — but not with agreeableness, conscientiousness or a tendency to feel guilt.

Dr. Marcus also identified circumstances that can provoke spiteful outbursts from otherwise temperate people: partisan politics, for example. (“If the other candidate wins, I hope the economy crashes.”) Or bitter divorces, like the husband who threw his savings into a trash bin, Dr. Marcus said, to avoid sharing any money with his ex-wife.