Were you a whiny, rigid kid? Are you a vapid republican now?

How to spot a baby conservative

KID POLITICS | Whiny children, claims a new study, tend to grow up rigid and traditional. Future liberals, on the other hand ...
Mar. 19, 2006. 10:45 AM
KURT KLEINER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative.

At least, he did if he was one of 95 kids from the Berkeley area that social scientists have been tracking for the last 20 years. The confident, resilient, self-reliant kids mostly grew up to be liberals.

The study from the Journal of Research Into Personality isn't going to make the UC Berkeley professor who published it any friends on the right. Similar conclusions a few years ago from another academic saw him excoriated on right-wing blogs, and even led to a Congressional investigation into his research funding.

But the new results are worth a look. In the 1960s Jack Block and his wife and fellow professor Jeanne Block (now deceased) began tracking more than 100 nursery school kids as part of a general study of personality. The kids' personalities were rated at the time by teachers and assistants who had known them for months. There's no reason to think political bias skewed the ratings — the investigators were not looking at political orientation back then. Even if they had been, it's unlikely that 3- and 4-year-olds would have had much idea about their political leanings.

A few decades later, Block followed up with more surveys, looking again at personality, and this time at politics, too. The whiny kids tended to grow up conservative, and turned into rigid young adults who hewed closely to traditional gender roles and were uncomfortable with ambiguity.

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests. The girls were still outgoing, but the young men tended to turn a little introspective.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful, intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a political bias.

Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.

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`I found (the Jack Block study) to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best'

Jeff Greenberg
University of Arizona

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"I found it to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best," he said of the Block study. He thinks insecure, defensive, rigid people can as easily gravitate to left-wing ideologies as right-wing ones. He suspects that in Communist China, those kinds of people would likely become fervid party members.

The results do raise some obvious questions. Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes filled with little proto-conservative whiners?

Or does an insecure little boy raised in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?

Or do the whiny kids grow up conservative along with the majority of their more confident peers, while only the kids with poor impulse control turn liberal?

Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. For instance, there was a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult. Another way of saying it is that self-reliance predicts statistically about 7 per cent of the variance between kids who became liberal and those who became conservative. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.

Their grown-up conclusion that the safest thing is to stick to tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe that's just moral certainty.

The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as self-indulgent and ineffectual.

Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along behind, rationalizing after the fact?

It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments about tax policy or free trade or health care, and more with the personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance science writer.

doh!

beaten

Mulch Ennui is currently on Hiatus reinventing himself.

I will provide the chaos in Mr. Mulch Ennui's Absence.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Mulch Ennui
I hereby authorize Hooch Matador to handle my forum business whilst I am on respite.



I Will also be groping his gf for him

doh!

beaten

How's the corn lookin?

How much is your tier fee?

theres no corn for the record

i should be so lucky!!!!

stoopid bank has lost my check card in the mail 3 TIMES. I have been without an ATM card since Feb 1st. I finally asked them to ship it to the bank since they could not seem to get it to my home OR PO Box! Supposedly it will arrive next week. To make matters worse, that is my business account...

Lets just say my manufacturers aren't particularly happy with me atm (but they value our relationship and know I have made them a lot of money over time, so they continue to stock me knowing I will make good on the debts).

It seems LL isn't interested in waiting until next week to be paid my final tier payment despite having my account prepaid for a year (Sans decided she'd rather keep Mars hotel than let me sell it, I had 1 final half sim tier payment left), so Mulch Ennui is currently sequestered on death row... execution date (according to the most fucking helpful Linden ever to be caught lying to residents on the forums, Lee Linden , is April 8th, 12:01 AM.

(I expect protesters if my cc doesn't come in by then)

/me Contemplates making a Lee Linden Video ala b. Madisons Jeska video, although with a gay furry bukake ending

so in order to avoid the embarrassing outing of Mulch Ennuis death sentence, I made up this whole sceneria about Mulch reinventing himself, and a new image, a new look, and was about to develop a smack habit, but you had to fucking ruin it all by accusing me of being corn meal!!!!!


Thanks a fucking lot Leck for humiating me like this =)

good thing I can look at the world with an open, independant mind and ambiguity does not make me soil myself, cuz I am a confident, resilient, self-reliant Liberal!

you gonna pay it for me?

I'll start spelling your name right

Yes. And you can spell my name however you like just so long as you spell it correctly when you pay me back.

-Kiamat Dusk

thats ok, according to your thinking I could have a debt of $9,000,000,000,000 (thats is trillion with a T) before having to think about paying it back

I was making a serious offer unrelated to our differing political views. But, ok.

-Kiamat Dusk

I wasn't whiney as a kid. I'm not vapid now. But I am conservative. I also question the findings of a "study" with these conclusions done by a professer at frikkin Berkeley .

-Kiamat Dusk

How's the corn lookin?

Oh and Rose, so busted reading drudgereport.

I am SO busted

.

the thing about Drudge is he claims he is conservative...

however the more damning stuff on Bush shows up on Drudge the most often a couple days before major media picks it up

I don't like his personal political policy, but if any conservative media was alloewed to wear the label fair and balanced, it would have to be drudge's "blog"

seriously, it prolly pains him to post as much dirt as he does on Bush, but evidently he takes his "role" seriously

his radio show, is another matter altogether, and editorially more in line with Fox than his headlines would have you believe

I wasn't whiney as a kid. I'm not vapid now. But I am conservative. I also question the findings of a "study" with these conclusions done by a professer at frikkin Berkeley .

And they've been less than kind to him on his immigration and border policies.