People who have a conservative political ideology have more self-control than those identifying themselves as liberals, researchers from the University of Cincinnati reported in this week's early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

In three separate studies, assistant marketing professor Joshua John Clarkson and his colleagues examined the link between a person's political leanings and two key indicators of self-control in humans (attention regulation and task persistence). They found that conservatives scored higher in both traits consistently and independent of race, age, gender or other factors.

Two of the studies detailed in the report involved tasks conducted by undergraduate students at a pair of Midwestern universities over the past year, while the third involved 135 people across the US who took part in a survey through the Amazon Mechanical Turk service, the authors said.

Studies gauged attention devoted to, time spent on tasks

In one study, 147 undergraduate students were asked to sit in front of a computer screen. Each individual was presented with a word representing a color displayed on a background of another color. Clarkson and his colleagues examined how quickly participants would respond with the word, controlling for correctness.