Berkeley psychologist: whiny kids grow up to be conservatives

I haven't read the study, but I'll interject in italics possible translations from Berkeley-speak:

How to spot a baby conservative
Kurt Kleiner
Toronto Star

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. ...

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. [In other words, they are heterosexuals.]

The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose [i.e., not searching for gainful employment and living in their parents' garages], turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests [mescaline, Grateful Dead music, tying bandanas around their dogs' necks, etc.]. The girls were still outgoing [i.e., slept around a lot, with both sexes], but the young men tended to turn a little introspective [i.e., unmanly and beaten down psychologically by Berkeley's political correctness]...

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.

A reader replies:

Maybe you suburban kids missed it, but we "townies" from college towns saw right through this Berkeley study.

"...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?"

Gee, this 3-year-old "conservative" sounds an awful lot like a 33-year-old liberal.

"Chances are he grew up to be a conservative."

No, chances are he grew up... period!

Perhaps liberals are people who peaked in nursery school, and thus want to turn the rest of the world into a giant nursery school.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer