Whiny Kids Become Conservatives?

Caught this at the Volokh Conspiracy. I hope someone can find and pass on the study.

I'm not sure why people are getting offended by this. Personally I could care less whether I was a whiny child or not. In fact my expecience tells me that the vast majority of children are whiny. Doesn't make my observations correct, but it does tell you something about the validity of data collection in the study.

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.

You got it, another micro-study that uses opinions, this time of teachers, to set the grounds for the conclusions. What ever happened to real scientific studies?

The article talks about the peer review that calls the study shoddy and the cries of political purposes. Probably both are true. Funny that the study was done in Berkeley. The article's author tries to offer some solace to the conservatives:

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.

I suppose I don't need such solace. I just hope that the study is true. If it is, California and Massachusetts are going to be the most rigidly conservative states in about 10 years. (And pigs will fly while spouting Shakespeare.)