I suspect a decent amount of this is selection bias on the internet. Also I don’t know if anger is an opposite to happiness. Maybe you can be happy a lot and angry a lot.
But I also wonder if the original study isn’t selection bias too. Would a “secular person” be happier if they didn’t give up religion even if they felt moved too?
I made that observation with real life people I was member of a while ago. And from reading actual conservative journal that used to ne a print. If anything, on the internet they looked calmer.
I guess that in real life they were more open about what they really thought.
And how do you know that? I imagine someone could come to that conclusion by doing something like generalizing from 10 minutes of AM talk radio or direct mail flyers, but kind of thing won't shed any light on the day to day experience of actual conservative people.
And the GP is right. I listened to an Ezra Klein (a progressive) podcast about teen mental health, and the expert noted that phenomena the GP refers to: teen mental health is better for kids from conservative families than kids from liberal families. One of the theories they put out is maybe conservative families put more limits on smartphone/social media use, while liberal families did not and eagerly embraced the new thing, resulting in their kids getting more unmitigated exposure to psychologically damaging technology.
That was my observation of conservatives around, the content of conservative journals I have read. I grew up in basically conservative environment. You know, the peer group where you end up being genuinely surprised when you find out atheist kids are not constantly sleeping around and are not constantly desperate for meaning. Looking back, I do not think we were morally or behaviorally superior, but we were definitely taught that we are.
