Left vs. Right: How polarised are our everyday lives?

Today, much of life seems increasingly politically divided.

But little is known about the mundane details of everyday life and how politics seeps into these ‘smaller’ activities – the minutiae of how we spend most of our time, such as when and where we socialise, work or travel. Do political leanings shape how we live our everyday lives? 

For our research - Lifestyle Polarization on a College Campus: Do Liberals and Conservatives Behave Differently in Everyday Life? - we wanted to find out more about how people live across the political divide. We went to a large US state university in Austin, Texas and more than 1,200 undergraduates helped us by declaring their political identity – whether and how strongly they felt they were liberal or conservative.

Rather than relying on self-reported surveys to measure behaviour at a single point in time as much previous research has done, we used data collected by these students’ smartphones to track what they were doing over time – were they texting or jogging or in the bar? Did they exercise more at weekends, were their mornings spent online? Using phones, we were able to gather data on some 60 different behavioural tendencies to a level of detail not possible through more traditional methods.

Political identities impact the choice of third spaces and leisure activities

Political identities structure people’s non-political actions and the way they live, relax and move about. Conservatives tended to spend time in social places such as bars, parties and noisy places. They also engaged in more physical activity. Liberals by contrast were more likely to spend time at home, use more social media, or work more. If we had to sum it up, conservatives made the most of their local surroundings, while liberals explored more distant places – and were less likely to socialise closer to home.

Even though liberals and conservatives behaved differently in everyday life, the differences were not obvious to members of the campus community. In a separate study, we asked undergraduates if they could estimate differences in how their fellow liberal and conservative classmates lived and spent their time. This was to gauge how accurately people estimate differences in lifestyle among members of their own community. Our participants got nearly 75 per cent of behaviours wrong -- they tended to see lifestyle differences when there were in fact none. 

Opportunities for interactions at the crossroads of ideology are minimal

Back in the 1950s, political differences between Democrats and Republicans, both in terms of platforms and demographics, were so subtle that political scientists considered this problematic - a lack of differentiation between the parties did not give voters enough choice. This no longer appears to be the case. As our research shows, students living on the same campus have different lifestyles according to their political identities. Research has shown that the divide between those on the right and left is growing in terms of policy preferences and disdain for those on the other side. But our work reveals that politics has penetrated even nonpolitical areas of everyday life.

Why does this matter? When people from different political sides get together, they might find they share more than they realise. Face to face contact is a way of breaking down barriers, understanding each other and bridging the political divide. Socialising helps to dispel prejudice on both sides and allows people to discover what they have in common.

If people have little chance of crossing paths with those of a different political identity in everyday life, divisions within society may become even deeper.

Our second survey, which asked students about their perceptions of people linked to their politics, revealed some good news – the political divide in everyday life isn’t as extreme as people believe, and this offers scope to build on what they share rather than how they differ.

But in fact, our work asks more questions than it answers. Our innovative use of smartphone data could be developed to tell us more about the wellbeing of people on different sides of the political spectrum. For instance, prior research finds that liberals tend to be unhappier than conservatives. We could look more closely at whether differences in the things liberals and conservatives do each day could explain this partisan wellbeing gap. Smartphones could be used to measure the social media apps people use and when, alongside different measures of wellbeing such as anxiety or loneliness at different times of the day and night.

By looking at the nonpolitical – the fabric of everyday – we’ve unearthed another source of growing political division in society. As US film director John Cassavetes remarked back in 1971, “there is only one level of agreement. And that is lifestyle. If your lifestyle is like my lifestyle, then we like each other. If your lifestyle is not like my lifestyle then we can see nothing in each other.”

Our research hints at a troubling possibility - that the lifestyle differences of those on the left and the right mean that they can see nothing in each other.

Edited 27 May 2025: This article’s headline was changed from “Left vs. Right: Are our everyday lives more polarised than we think?” to better reflect the findings of the research.