Do you ever wonder why there are particular lifestyle choices common to people with similar political beliefs? Last Fall, Professor Michael W. Macy from Cornell University presented his work on the correlation between lifestyle and political choices, in a meetup talk titled, “Why do Liberals Drink Lattes?”
There is an underlying assumption that a person’s lifestyle is influenced by a person’s ideology. Hence liberals, who are assumed to love foreign materials, are associated with drinking lattes. Past surveys correlating political beliefs and lifestyle habits have used multivariate linear models to collect and analyze data, but Professor Macy believes these results are inaccurate, as these methods assume the observations are independent and randomly distributed. According to him, the data from these surveys does not take into consideration the effect of one’s social circle on one’s political decisions.
“Why do Liberals Drink Lattes” showed how a person’s social circle influences their political opinions by creating two independent models, one which accounted for an individuals social circle, and one which did not. There was a significantly higher correlation in the test that accounted for a person’s social circle in the formation of political opinions, proving Macy’s point that social influence is a greater indicator of political decisions than lifestyle choices.
Although there is certainly a pattern between lifestyle choices and political opinions, the ultimate takeaway was that political opinions and lifestyle choices are not truly correlated, rather, political opinions and lifestyle choices are both informed by one’s social circle.
Article by Rishabh Jain