[caption id="attachment_4588" align="aligncenter" width="640"] 10 Downing Street Door image © The Prime Ministers Office and used under CC license[/caption]
Along with many thousand of people at the moment I have underlying thoughts of the UK general election. I admit that I am interested in politics, and more so as I get older, but it does not consume my waking hours.
I recently read an article about voting preferences by Jonathan Haidt who is a professor of psychology at New York University's Stern School of Business and the author of The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. To take the survey described in this essay, visit yourmorals.org.
In the article he discusses some of the reasons people vote for a particular political party and uses a U.S survey as the basis of his findings. he says “One of the most robust findings in social psychology is that people find ways to believe whatever they want to believe. And the left really want to believe the duping hypothesis. It absolves them from blame and protects them from the need to look in the mirror or figure out what they stand for in the 21st century.” and “Despite being in the wake of a financial crisis that – if the duping theorists were correct – should have buried the cultural issues and pulled most voters to the left, we are finding in America and many European nations a stronger shift to the right. When people fear the collapse of their society, they want order and national greatness, not a more nurturing government.
I found the above statements interesting in relationship to our door business as we find that purchasing power and sales fluctuations often relate to what is going on in the world. For instance, at times during the financial crisis there was a feeling that it was risky to over spend and house buying slowed down which was a sensible move for many people. We found that many of our customers purchased high quality doors and added value to the properties they owned through this further refurbishment. The fitting of beautiful internal and external doors will have paid off as the economy improved, by increasing the value of their properties.
Therefore, I agree with the statement by Jonathan Haidt that when people feel threatened they look for more order and have a greater sense of pride.