Who’d want to be Minister for School Lunches? It can’t have been much fun to be David Seymour as a veritable smorgasbord of bad press dominated the headlines in March. Not much cause to smile when someone ends up in A&E with burns from your lunch.
In fact, think of any politician – are they smiling? Are they happy?
Anyone can smile, of course, but a real smile reaches beyond upturned lips. Genuine happiness activates the orbicularis oculi, a muscle involved in reflexive closing of the eyelid, and zygomaticus major, which stretches from the corners of the mouth to the orbicularis oculi. The zygomaticus major pulls our mouths up into what we recognise as a smile, and we can fake that one, but not the orbicularis oculi. That’s what crinkles up the edges of our eyes when we’re genuinely smiling.
We’re pretty good at spotting a fake smile, and it’s not hard to train a research assistant to classify photos of politicians into real and fake smiles. Which is exactly what Sean Wojcik did for part of his PhD at the University of California, Irvine.
A trained coder examined photos of US Congress members featured in the Congressional Pictorial Directory in Barack Obama’s second term. He found conservative Republicans not only smiled less (less zygomaticus major action), but when they did smile, it was notably less likely to be genuine.
This carried over into the public utterances of these politicians: liberals used more positively valenced emotion language in their tweets and social media posts, Wojcik found in further research.
Why should we care? After all, I’m personally pretty happy that I’m not in the US right now – school lunches are the least of Americans’ worries. I’m interested because it’s taken for granted in political psychology that conservatives are happier than liberals. Or, more accurately, they’re more likely to say they’re happy than liberals.
So, we’ve got a dysjunction between self-reported happiness among voters, and the appearance of happiness in the people they elect. Maybe Donald Trump is smiling on the inside.
Does this pattern hold in New Zealand? As far as I can tell, nobody has looked at this, so I have to turn to my own data – specifically, responses of the 5000 or so who answered questions about happiness in my mental health “State of the Nation” survey at the end of 2023.
The good news is that most of us are pretty happy – more than two-thirds of respondents described themselves as a happy person and just under one in five disagreed. For context, New Zealand sat 10th in the 2023 World Happiness Report.
And no matter how I define what it means to be liberal or conservative in this country, based on who people vote for, or where they place themselves on a scale from liberal to conservative on social, economic or general issues, New Zealanders are statistically more likely to say they’re happy if they lean to the right.
Why? Part of the reason is demographic, because older people tend to be both happier and more conservative.
In the US, religion also predicts both happiness and conservatism, and older people are also more likely to be religious.
Another explanation is that the general pattern reflects the palliative effects of conservative political beliefs, which serve to make people feel safer and certain.
Back to the World Happiness Index. The top three nations are, in keeping with past rankings, Nordic: Finland, Denmark and Iceland. With the slightly odd exception of Israel (fourth place), eight of the top nine slots are taken by European nations. But even in countries where people are generally happy, it’s still the case that political conservatives are happier.
For lols, why not go have a look at the New Zealand Parliament website and see who’s smiling in their official photos. David, you need more zygomaticus major action.
