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Researchers insist they can tell someone's politlcal affiliation by looking at the condition of their offices and bedrooms. Messy? You're a lefty. A neatnik? Welcome to the Right.

According to a controversial new study, set to be published in The Journal of Political Psychology, the bedrooms and offices of liberals, who are generally thought of as open, tend to be colorful and awash in books about travel, ethnicity, feminism and music, along with music CDs covering folk, classic and modern rock, as well as art supplies, movie tickets and travel memorabilia.

Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to surround themselves with calendars, postage stamps, laundry baskets, irons and sewing materials in their personal spaces, according to the study. Their bedrooms and offices are well-lighted and decorated with sports paraphernalia and flags—especially American ones.

"This is different from putting up an Obama–Biden sticker on your bulletin board," says Sam Gosling, who co-authored the study that included surveys and room inspections of 76 college students and 94 professionals ranging fromrealtors to architects.

These room cues are "behavioral residue," says Gosling, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. The idea is that distinct cognitive inclinations of liberals towards ambiguity and intellectualism, and conservatives toward order, "drive the way one leads one's life and displays one's life in their living and work spaces," says Gosling's co-author Dana Carney, an assistant professor of management at Columbia University's Business School in New York City.

Those cognitive styles turn up in a personality test called the Big Five, which assesses people for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism; only the first two have been strongly linked to political tendencies, says New York University (N.Y.U.) social psychologist John Jost, another author on the study.

"It's pleasurable for liberals to think more. They gravitate toward art, to things that are not as concrete," says Carney. "Conservatives have a need for order, for there not to be ambiguity. There you see that expressed by being more orderly, having more cleaning supplies, needing to have everything lined up and organized so that one feels one's environment is predictable and therefore safe."

The findings are just the latest in a burst of recent attempts to unearth politics in personality, the brain and DNA. Brain scans using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and even genetic tests are turning up possible clues to our political origins and behaviors.

Positive personality traits associated with liberalism (self-reliant, resilient, dominating and energetic) and negative ones attributed to conservatism (easily victimized or offended, indecisive, fearful and rigid) appear as young as nursery school–age kids—and correlate with those children's political beliefs in adulthood, according to a 20-year study published in 2006 in the Journal of Research in Personality. More recently, scientists linked the strength of a person's startle response to their political leanings: conservatives tended to scare easier, blinking harder than liberals when they heard a loud noise.