Study Whiny Kids Turn Into Conservative Adults - Road to the Middle Class

IT JUST CONFIRMS the suspicion that every liberal has had since childhood. Remember those whiny, insecure kids in elementary school? They all turned into bible-thumping conservative Christian bigots, didn’t they?

Yes, it’s true. Now a researcher has confirmed what many liberals suspected. By following 100 children from Berkeley, California, through their lives they have found a 7% correlation between whininess and conservatism. According to Kurt Kleiner in the Toronto Star:

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.
...
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.
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The confident kids turned out liberal and were still hanging loose, turning into bright, non-conforming adults with wide interests.

Oh dear. The truth is out at last!

Needless to say, conservative bloggers like Red America’s Ben Domenech are not amused.

But let us face it, the study just confirms what another study from Berkeley discovered a couple of years ago.

Four researchers who culled through 50 years of research literature about the psychology of conservatism report that at the core of political conservatism is the resistance to change and a tolerance for inequality, and that some of the common psychological factors linked to political conservatism include:

* Fear and aggression
* Dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity
* Uncertainty avoidance
* Need for cognitive closure
* Terror management

"From our perspective, these psychological factors are capable of contributing to the adoption of conservative ideological contents, either independently or in combination," the researchers wrote in an article, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," recently published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.

No doubt the learned professors are right. Conservatives are prone to a little rigidity on things like the rule of law and the meaning of the constitution. Rather in the way that liberals are rigid about the meaning of Roe v. Wade.

Rather than representing conservatism—or liberalism—as a pathology, we could try a non-pathological world-view, for instance the developmental psychology of Clare Graves. Popularized by his students Don Beck and Christopher Cowan as Spiral Dynamics (see here, here and here, and a site devoted to Clare Graves here), it experiences Bible-believing conservatives as “purposeful blue,” creative businessmen and artists as “adventurous orange,” and touchy-feely liberals as “communitarian green.”

Here is how the Graves system works. You start out an “impulsive red” victim. You rise to blue by accepting Jesus into your life; you rise from blue to orange by deciding that life is a game to be won; and you rise to green caring and sharing when you decide that the life of the ego isn’t that important after all.

However, dear reader, there is a higher, better level, “integrated yellow,” where you and I reside. Yellow looks out on all these lesser levels and colors with lordly understanding and benign tolerance. Unlike those mean-spirited liberal social science professors!

But what I don’t understand is how all this meshes with the Pew Research Center’s recent Are We Happy Yet? poll. In that poll, it turns out that conservatives are happier than liberals, and church-going conservatives happier still. Are they whiny because they are happy, or happy because they are whiny? And conservatives have been happier than liberals since they started the periodic study in 1972. What is the meaning of that?

Clearly more research is needed.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.