Smartphone data suggests conservatives do in fact have more fun

It can often seem as if people on the opposite side of the political divide live entirely different existences. A new preprint paper, published earlier this month, highlights how it’s not just your intuition: In some ways, they really do.

A research team led by Imperial College, London’s Sanaz Talaifar tracked 1,300 college students’ smartphone data over a collective 11,400 days. The data traces produced came from the phone’s sensors, including GPS, microphones, calling, texting, unlocking screens, and other activities. Before participating in the smartphone tracking, participants were asked to place themselves on a seven-point scale, where one was extremely liberal and seven was extremely conservative. Those rankings were then used to cross-check against their smartphone activity, to see the extent to which someone’s behavior and their politics intertwined.

Talaifar and her colleagues found that there were differences—though she admits that how you interpret the data depends on whether you’re a glass-half-full or half-empty kind of person.

“There are a lot of areas where we don’t see a lot of differences,” says Talaifar. For example, people of both political persuasions tend to text and call each other roughly the same amount. But when it comes to how they spend their time, some gulfs emerged.

“As one of the graduate students in my department put it, liberals do more boring things,” says Talaifar. “They are spending more time doing chores, they’re spending more time at home. They’re spending more time on social media, they spend more time working.” By contrast, conservatives spend more time in noisy bars and attending parties. “They’re less stationary,” she explains.

By tracking 61 different behavioral tendencies, the researchers were able to unpick the differences in how people of various political persuasions lived their lives. Across the study period, 17 out of 61 behavioral tendencies on a day-to-day basis were associated with a person’s political orientation. But taking a less-frequent approach—by looking at when behavioral tendencies and political beliefs correlated at least one time of day or week—uncovered that 29 of 61 behavioral tendencies were associated with a person’s politics.

Talaifar is less certain as to why those lifestyle differences between ideologies exist in the first place.

She does suggest, however, there could some kind of sociological network effect at play: Since the two political opposites don’t meet, what it means to be liberal or conservative is manifest through a handful of outsize influencers within the social circle, which dictates more broadly what it means to be politically aligned with that ideology.

The starkness of the findings surprised Talaifar because she believed the college campus environment on which she conducted the survey would iron out any differences in where or how people lived. “It is really surprising that you see robust differences between liberals and conservatives,” she says, “even when you’re constraining their geographic differences and all that.”

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