You can visit any number of websites that claim to tell you the difference between liberals and conservatives. Examinations of education levels, habits, and even food preferences all lead to essentially the same stereotypes. Conservatives like cheeseburgers, NASCAR races, and watching Steven Seagal movies from the 90s. Liberals are latte-sipping, dual major, poetry enthusiasts.

But none of that gets to the heart of the issue, which is two-fold: What leads someone to become one or the other, and how effective the “side” they’ve chosen is at keeping them.

An essay from Dr. Richard Hanania, a political science researcher from UCLA, attempts to examine exactly those aspects of political affiliation, and he makes some truly exceptional observations.

For Hanania, the standard explanations of conservatives as fans of authority (cops and the military) or of religion or “morals” don’t cut it. Likewise, reducing liberals to Palestine-defending, BLM-supporting gay marriage fans wasn’t sufficient either.

Instead, Hanania settled on a much easier concept to grasp: Liberals read, while conservatives watch TV.

That’s not some blanket statement about how they were raised or what their interests were growing up or any of that. It points to the current habits of each, and how they tend to interact with politics in the first place.

A poll from Pew Research is presented in graph form and shows, for example, that 60 percent of conservatives reported getting at least some of their news from Fox. And while liberals also reported CNN or MSNBC as sources, when it came to print-based news, all of the conservative responses dropped off precipitously, while liberals still reported getting at least some of their news from those sources.

Liberals were more than three times as likely to read the New York Times or Washington Post, and even read conservative-leaning publications like the Wall Street Journal with more frequency than conservatives.

Add to that the fact that conservatives listen to a lot of partisan political radio — something more akin to television than, say, NPR or BBC news that liberals may take in — and it paints a picture of one side that’s dependent on “infotainment” and another that cares more about credibility.

In fact, this tendency toward consuming media rather than news could explain a lot about why you see so many fact checks on posts that your Republican family members post on Facebook, and even why there are so many pop-up ads when you stumble across a conservative website.

But don’t try to explain this over Thanksgiving dinner to your racist uncle. Just send him a book.