<p>According to my Psychology textbook, liberals and conservatives tend to diverge in their attribution of social problems: conservatives might attribute a person’s unemployment or poverty to a lack of work ethic or inherent personality deficiency, whereas a liberal is more likely to attribute the same problem to uncontrollable circumstances like discrimination in employment, financial limitations on education, etc. So in principle, yes, both sides of the ideological spectrum are striving for the same goals for society, but since in some cases they disagree on the fundamental causes of issues, ideas of what solutions would be effective vary greatly.</p>