Are Conservatives More Honest Than Liberals? Oh Yeah!

by John Hawkins | June 2, 2008 1:07 pm

Now certainly, there are plenty of honest liberals out there. However, percentage wise, conservatives tend to be more Christian, more concerned with values, and more concerned with just being decent people.

This is why conservatives tend to be more vulnerable to the “hypocrite” charge: you have to have morals and values in the first place to be a hypocrite. If your attitude is everything goes, yes, you’re not going to be a hypocrite, but you’re a pretty lousy human being.

Of course liberals, being liberals, want to have it both ways. They don’t want to stand up for moral values, but they want to be considered just as moral as the people who do.

However, the hard, cold reality is that on the whole, liberals just aren’t as moral as conservatives[1],

Is it OK to cheat on your taxes? A total of 57 percent of those who described themselves as “very liberal” said yes in response to the World Values Survey, compared with only 20 percent of those who are “very conservative.” When Pew Research asked whether it was “morally wrong” to cheat Uncle Sam, 86 percent of conservatives agreed, compared with only 68 percent of liberals.

Ponder this scenario, offered by the National Cultural Values Survey: “You lose your job. Your friend’s company is looking for someone to do temporary work. They are willing to pay the person in cash to avoid taxes and allow the person to still collect unemployment. What would you do?”

Almost half, or 49 percent, of self-described progressives would go along with the scheme, but only 21 percent of conservatives said they would.

When the World Values Survey asked a similar question, the results were largely the same: Those who were very liberal were much more likely to say it was all right to get welfare benefits you didn’t deserve.

The World Values Survey found that those on the left were also much more likely to say it is OK to buy goods that you know are stolen. Studies have also found that those on the left were more likely to say it was OK to drink a can of soda in a store without paying for it and to avoid the truth while negotiating the price of a car.

Another survey by Barna Research found that political liberals were two and a half times more likely to say that they illegally download or trade music for free on the Internet.

A study by professors published in the American Taxation Association’s Journal of Legal Tax Research found conservative students took the issue of accounting scandals and tax evasion more seriously than their fellow liberal students. Those with a “liberal outlook” who “reject the idea of absolute truth” were more accepting of cheating at school, according to another study, involving 291 students and published in the Journal of Education for Business.

A study in the Journal of Business Ethics involving 392 college students found that stronger beliefs toward “conservatism” translated into “higher levels of ethical values.” And academics concluded in the Journal of Psychology that there was a link between “political liberalism” and “lying in your own self-interest,” based on a study involving 156 adults.

Liberals were more willing to “let others take the blame” for their own ethical lapses, “copy a published article” and pass it off as their own, and were more accepting of “cheating on an exam,” according to still another study in the Journal of Business Ethics.

Again, this is not to say that every conservative is honest or that every liberal is dishonest, but there is a very real difference between those ideologies and the effect that they have on people who ascribe to them.