STUDY: Confident, self-reliant kids grow up - liberals; Whiny Kids - Conservative

STUDY CLAIMS: Confident, resilient, self-reliant kids grow up to be liberals; Whiny children: conservatives...

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.

"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.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...le&cid=1142722231554&call_pageid=970599119419
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It all makes sense now

 

None of that surprises me. It makes a lot of sense.

Of course, you know, it will never be accepted by the conservatives here because of the "Toronto Connection". That would be enough to sink the whole thing, apparently.

 

That's funny, cuz yo-yo is a habitual whiner and he's a liberal. Hmm.

 

We all know who the habitual troll is

 

Well if you want a more detailed analysis. Here you go:

Read this as. I had opinion going in, so I melded the facts to support it.

You expect me to take this story seriously, when someone - in the same article - calls this guy's research a bunch of bull shit?

If you have a self confidence issue and need to bring conservatives down to make yourself feel better, please, try harder next time.

 

Because one person (who is probably a republican conservative) disagrees you can dismiss it.. so easy to dismiss things you don't like isn't it?

 

What evidence is there that person is a republican?

Conversely, since the person who did the story is (most likely a liberal) puts out a story, you eat it up like candy?

 

Yo-yo, Are you trying to prove that you are dumb kid?

 

Apart from that. I take this article as liberal bias.

 

The report has no credibility, because of the research spread, rather the lack of it.

It would be like me studying 100 people in Las Vegas and then coming up with the ridiculous conclusion that adults in all parts of the USA like to gamble.

The sample size is also far too small to be anything worth noting.

 

The most shocking thing in that article to me was that there are actually conservatives living in Berkeley

 

What about those who are apolitical? Yes, I know we are normal people

 

I was thinking the same thing. The study is the exact opposite of reality.

 

You mean there's actually parts of the country where people don't like to gamble????

... America is much, much worse off than I ever imagined.

 

Coming from a purely objective standpoint (I hate talking politics) I must say that the article's author was showing balance by getting an opposing viewpoint. That is a mark in his favor.

Further, if you read the whole article, it gave an alternate, less perjorative (to conservatives) interpretation of the findings near the end of the article.

Yes, the headline is inflamatory, and there is the issue of how do you scientifically quantify the term "whiny". I don't think the article itself is a good stand in for reading the paper.

So, it is a mix of good and bad. Or am I just being indecisive?

 

You're right... it wasn't conservatives who are constantly trying to take away and limit by whining, crying and even murdering...

Abortion, Cencorship, Evolution, Drugs, Gays rights, basically anything doug posts about..

 

I'm glad we finally agree on something...you are a whiner.

 

it may be true to some but we cannot generalize it since there are so many factors that affect our personality when kids grow up.

 

I've seen conservatives in South Africa that joined the ANC. That meant changing ideologies totally. But, I have also seen plenty liberals that became rather conservative under the same circumstances.

Perhaps the conservatives that joint the political party in power were the whiny kids in nursery school.

Whatever political party offers more security or let's say is in power will attract.

And, of course, the better opportunity counts a lot, unfortunately.

 

This is a cute post. Thanks for the smile.