Study: whiny pre-schoolers grow up to be conservatives Parents wanting to know the future political leanings of their children might take a cue from a new study that says whiny, insecure pre-schoolers are more likely to become conservatives, while the more confident, self-reliant pre-schoolers tend to grow up to become liberals.
At least whiny pre-schoolers from the liberal bastion of Berkeley, California, where this study was conducted.
In the 1960s Jack Block [a UC-Berkeley professor] 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.
The professor "admits 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."
This study raises plenty of questions, The Star report points out a few of them:
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?
I wonder, too, about how personality type (such as those identified through the Myers-Briggs test, for example) influence political leanings.