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Monday, March 20, 2006

Whiny children make ship-shape conservatives?

Posted by on March 20 at 10:16 AM

Who am I to argue with science:

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.

Sadly, I know just as many whiny liberals as I do conservatives. The only discernable difference is that liberals tend to be much handsomer.


CommentsRSS icon

and liberal women much hotter too.

so damn hot.

Funny stuff, though "whiny" and "confident" were never really defined in the study.

Maybe that just means that conservatives were spoiled children, hence all the whining.

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