Whiny Conservatives, Self-Reliant Liberals

The conclusions of this study seemed self-evident to me, at first:

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.

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.

Until they cited the correlation coefficient:

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.

Boy - 0.27! My experience is that any correlation coefficient less than 0.80 borders on crap, and that anything less than 0.50 IS crap! It's possible to get better correlation coefficients by throwing darts blindfolded. So, this statement seems sound:

"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.

These questions also seem viable:

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?

Not scientific, but fun, silly stuff for a tedious Wednesday! I found this snarky blogpost from Smirking Chimp irresistible!

Regarding the study reported in the Toronto Star showing that the whiny kid who was always complaining how something wasn't fair probably grew up to be conservative, National Review's Jonah Goldberg whines that the study isn't fair.