Psychology and Political Science

College Majors Humanities Majors
1

Which of the private schools has psychology and political science departments that agree that a “libertarian” personality is completely different from a “conservative” personality?

2

Another thing, is there any political science department that has normal classes like american government or comparitive politics?

3

Most political science classes have classes like American government or comparative politics.

As for your first question…your job, when evaluating colleges and departments, is not to find a department that aligns with what you think you already know or what you believe. You, instead, are looking for a place where you can get a good solid education. Some of that educational work may involve challenging what you believe (and/or finding out something you thought was true was actually not true). This is especially true in social scientific fields like psychology and political science, where findings and theories are established by doing actual scientific work (surveys, experiments, etc.) and not by speculation.

To that end, you won’t find a school that agrees with that because

  1. There’s no scientific evidence to support that. Conservative and libertarian are not personality types; they are political preferences, and people with all kinds of personality characteristics can be conservative or libertarian. There is some research supporting the idea that some personality traits predict certain social/political attitudes - but they aren’t categories as big as “conservative” and “libertarian” (which are somewhat undefined) but usually specific ideas or attitudes.

  2. Departments are made up of individuals. The professors in the department may agree on some large issues - for example, all of the biologists in most biology departments would probably agree that evolution is a scientific fact - but they are likely to disagree or partially disagree on many other scientific and scholarly issues. In fact, that is what makes departments great - when there’s some diversity of thought and opinion and scholars can discuss and debate.

Also, there are thousands of private schools in the U.S., so even if a particular department did espouse this, you’d have to do some individual research to find it.