Does Leaning Left Politically Make You a More Prosocial Person?

Empirical study establishes weak association

It is often assumed that people who hold left-wing political beliefs have stronger prosocial traits and are more altruistic than those who support right-wing parties. This assumption is probably rooted in the fact that parties on the left are more likely to have social welfare and justice issues on their political agenda, such as financial support for the unemployed or a minimum wage. In turn, it is assumed that left-leaning persons themselves have a more prosocial attitude. But is this really the case? A comprehensive study conducted by the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, now found that while there is a connection between political orientation and prosociality, it is weaker than previously assumed. 

Psychology refers to actions that help or support others without any direct benefit to the helper as prosocial behavior. The notion of social welfare, which is at the center of left-wing political agendas, is also of a prosocial nature: Society provides the means to enable everyone to manage their lives, even, for example, when they are unemployed. But does that mean that those who vote for left-wing parties hold more prosocial attitudes than those who support right-wing parties? This is the question that was tackled by a team of German researchers, who based their investigation on comprehensive data from around 1,800 persons in Germany of different ages, genders, and educational backgrounds. They were surveyed on their political orientation and personality and participated in several tasks known as economic games, developed to explore prosocial behavior in an experimental setting. This study represents one of the most comprehensive investigations of the connection between political orientation and prosociality so far.

As is often the case in science, the results proved more complex than expected. In general, it could be confirmed that there is indeed a link between political orientation and prosociality. “There is a tendency that supporting left-wing ideologies and parties goes along with stronger prosociality,” explains Max Planck researcher Isabel Thielmann.

However, this tendency was not evident with all measures of prosociality employed in the study. For example, the association could not be consistently shown in what is known as the Dictator Game, i.e., a behavioral game in which only one of two players (the “dictator”) may decide how a specific sum of money is split between them. The same is true for the so-called Public Goods Game, in which participants choose how many of their private tokens they put into a public pot, where they will be multiplied, without the other participants’ knowledge. The findings from these games demonstrated no clear tendency towards higher levels of prosociality in persons holding left-wing beliefs. Conversely, a consistent association could be shown for various self-report questionnaires assessing prosocial tendencies.

Thielmann sums up the study as follows, “Our investigation suggests that adherents to left-wing ideologies might actually be more prosocial than those supporting right-wing beliefs. That said, we were unable to establish this connection across all methods of measurement.” In addition, she sees a further need to explore to what extent right-leaning persons might show prosocial behavior within their own group as opposed to left-leaning persons potentially acting in a more prosocial way towards other people in general.

Data having been collected only in Germany, it is not possible to simply transfer these results to other states that might have a completely different political landscape. In the United States for example, (left-leaning) Democrats and (right-leaning) Republicans rarely work together, whereas coalition governments consisting of left-wing and right-wing parties are a common occurrence in Germany.

The study is about to be published in the renowned journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.