Conservatives may rate their mental health more positively than liberals in part because of stigma around the phrase "mental health," according to a study published April 30, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Brian F. Schaffner from Tufts University, U.S., and colleagues.
In the United States, a number of studies have found that conservatives rate themselves as being happier and having better mental health than their liberal counterparts. But it is unclear what causes this happiness gap. The difference could be a product of the correlation between conservatism and traits associated with mental health such as religious faith, patriotism, marriage, higher incomes, and old age, but could alternatively reflect differing ideas about the state of the world, or different attitudes to the concept of mental health.
To better understand the size and cause of this happiness gap, the authors of the study used a representative survey of 60,000 American adults from the 2022 Cooperative Election Study survey. They asked subjects about their mental health, their political ideology, and their demographics—including age, home ownership, marital status, and more. In the 2023 Cooperative Election Study survey, the scientists surveyed 1,000 American adults, Half were asked the same 2022 questions, while the other half were asked to rate their "mood" as opposed to their mental health.
In the 2022 survey, conservatives rated themselves on average 19 points higher for mental health than liberals. Once positive mental health traits like age, marital status, and church attendance were accounted for, the gap reduced by 40 percent, to 11 points. In the 2023 survey, when respondents were asked to rate their "overall mood" instead of their "mental health," the remaining differences disappeared. The 64 percent of highly positive ratings of "mental health" for conservatives dropped to 49 percent for "overall mood". In contrast, while 29 percent of liberals rated their "mental health" as fair or poor, only 17 percent rated their "overall mood" the same way.
The authors suggest that stigma for conservatives around the phrase "mental health" might contribute to the gap, while the negative mental health ratings by liberals might reflect increased awareness of mental health issues. The happiness gap, the authors note, may be dependent on which term is used to measure it.
The authors add: "There has been a lot of discussion about the notion that Conservatives are happier and have better mental well-being than Liberals, but we wanted to really test how true this is. What our experiment shows is that it really depends what you ask about. Yes, Conservatives report that their mental health is better than Liberals do, but that gap disappears entirely when we ask instead about each group's overall mood. The ideological gap in mental well-being is clearly not as straightforward or consistent as it is often made out to be."
"The idea for this project came from discussions with the three student coauthors who had been exposed to this claim that conservatives are happier than liberals in another class that they were taking at the time. We wanted to test how true that pattern was and what we ended up finding was that the ideological gap in mental well-being is not nearly as clear cut as it is often made out to be."
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS One: https://plos.io/3Yv4FOn
Citation: Schaffner BF, Hershewe T, Kava Z, Strell J (2025) Do conservatives really have better mental well-being than liberals? PLoS ONE 20(4): e0321573. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0321573
Author countries: U.S.
Funding: BFS received support from the National Science Foundation (award # 2148907) and Tufts University. The sponsors did not play any role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
