- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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 â· 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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'
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- 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.
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- The results do raise some obvious questions.
Are nursery school teachers in the conservative heartland cursed with classes
filled with little proto-conservative whiners?
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- Or does an insecure little boy raised
in Idaho or Alberta surrounded by conservatives turn instead to liberalism?
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance
science writer.
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