COMensarations
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Whiners & Losers
A Berkeley researcher thinks that if you were a whiner in nursery school, you’re a conservative whiner today.
According to a report via Drudge, the observant individual can spot a conservative in nursery school.
Somehow, I think they are ‘projecting’....
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.
Can the reporter or any of you remember life in nursery school? Seriously? You must be some kind of prototypical Mentat or something to remember THAT far back.
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.
I have rather serious doubts about this particular report. I think, as a Mensan, a retired lieutenant colonel of infantry, an airborne-ranger, with an undergrad degree of a double major and a masters in computers, a survivor of two divorces and happily married to a REAL woman, as in Proverbs 31, that I’m pretty ‘confident’, ‘resilient’ and ‘self-reliant’.
But I’m also ‘conservative’. How can THAT be? Must be an aspect of that top 2% business they had not factored in.
Then again, I don’t recall conservatives being all that keen on running to the ‘nanny state’ whenever things got ‘tight’ for them. But, I do notice that a LOT of ‘liberals’ tend to push the concept of the ‘nanny state’. Not only that, but as the reporter indicates in preceding paragraph (above), these liberals seem to run to the courts too, whining, whenever they don’t get their way in the legislature. Homosexual and abortion rights are good examples of that.
I get the distinct impression that the researchers and the reporter are ‘projecting’.
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.
Hardly upset. It just seems to me that those people on the Left Coast are doing what the people at the Washington Post did about a decade ago when they declared that anyone who was an evangelical christian was a member of Densa.
Well, I’m a born-again christian myself. Another example of that 2% factor throwing people for a loop? Perhaps. More than likely it too was an example of projection on the part of the writer.
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.
As I understand it, all the kids being tracked were in—now get this—Berkeley, California. But the reporter doesn’t think that bit of information is worthy of informing you. Might skew your understanding of the rightness of these findings.
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.
The young men, oh...did you notice that these people are in their 20s at this point? That was mentioned earlier, that this study has been going on for 20 years. More on that later.
These young men are probably ‘introspective’ because of the crazy divorce rate. The girls are probably out-going because they’re trying to land the big one.
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.
Oh...HERE he mentions Berkeley. How nice....
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.
Indeed it does. How many liberals are willing to jump out of a perfectly good airplane in flight, hit the ground running and engage an enemy in an effort to overwhelm him in order to defend this country?
Can I see a show of hands, please?
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 (the Jack Block study) to be biased, shoddy work, poor science at best’
Jeff Greenberg, University of Arizona....
“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?
Valid points, here.
Why was the research confined to Berkeley, California?
What would the results be if conducted in other parts of the country?
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.
.27? That’s not very much of a correlation. Less than a third, as I understand it. What gives for the other, almost, three-quarters? We aren’t told that information.
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.
Hardly ‘hurt’. After all, I’ve been abused by the best. This doesn’t hold a candle to what other conservatives could do.
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.
Rigid is in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps these liberals don’t understand things such as ‘the social contract’, the ‘rule of law’, etc., etc., etc. They might consider being required to stop at a stop sign, instead of blasting on through without slowing down, as ‘rigid’. How dare someone get in their way, causing them to crash their car and make them ‘late’.
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.
Actually, I think they’re paranoid as all get out, with all those out-going liberal women trying to trap them into some sort of permanent outflow of their hard-earned cash and other assets. What are the latest divorce figures for California? Berkeley? How about palimony cases? Compared against such figures for other, more ‘rigid’ parts of the country?
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.
It could well be that age and experience are factors as well.
As I mentioned earlier, this study is only about 20 years old. That would make the subjects only about 25 years of age at this time.
As I understand things, the human brain does not become fully developed until around the age of 30, when the myelination process of the brain is completed.
I remember my days as a liberal. They started at the age of 15. I was living in northern Louisiana during the late 60s. I was for desegregation when it was not popular to be for such in that place.
They stopped at the age of 26, when I noticed that the liberals were getting really ‘strange’. Getting away with what could be considered ‘murder’, literally; Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.
I grew out of my ‘liberal’ period. I’m confident that a lot of these young men and women these researchers studied these last 20 years will do the same.