Whiny Children


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. 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.

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.

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.

http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Con...d=970599119419

I was wondering how many of the kids they were able to later track, to see if there's a chance of stastical bias in the results. So of course, I tried to read the report. Perhaps it will be online again later, but right now the link is broken.

While today's breed of neoconservatives really irritates me, I find it hard to believe that this study is valid.

Looks good on paper, but you know there are plenty of those whiny depressive types on the far left too. It does make sense though, that a depressive type would find more comfort in sticking to a known older method, than something progressive.
Fear seems to push the right around more than the left. BOOH

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"The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
Marcus Aurelius

I was hoping nobody would respond to this post since obviously the poster was intent of starting a fight like the little tattle tale would in the back of the class.

Interesting but a small sample of 100 people certainly doesn't prove much in a country with near 300m.

As I look at the personality traits it would seem that I should be a liberal, but I'm not.

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That make no sense the whiny kids became independant business owners/employers and the out going kids became dependant on the government and labour unions? Sounds like more Liberal bull**** to me!

Reminds me of the British film series, 7up, 14up, 21up.....42up. It follows the development of British children from a variety of social classes. Anyone else seen the series?

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If you do a study on 100 children that reside in Berkley CA and 1 of the 100 cries and whines and he also happens to becomes a conservative it's safe to assume that 100% of the whiners are conservative.

True, if you use a confidence interval wide enough to land 747.

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I took a statistics course in business school, and it was one of the hardest courses I have ever taken.

One thing I do remember is that 100 is the smallest sample size you can have for a statistic to be "reliable", but the standard deviation is large.

Thus, I would not trust a study that is based off of just 100 samples.

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Statistsical analysis can be done on very small sample sizes but in the interest of full and complete reporting it is useful to report some measures of central tendencies. This will give the reader an idea of the reliability and generalizations possible from the analysis. I don't think it is possible, from this popular report, to come to any generalized understanding of a rigorously statistical nature. It maybe that the analysis is precise and accurate.

It intrigues me that this longitudinal analysis seems to contradict that horizontal analysis in which attitudes were compared between "conservatives" (whatever they are) and "liberals" (whatever they are) and the conservatives were more optimistic and positive than the liberals. But that report suffered from the same lame reporting as the one above.

Anyway, assuming both analyses are correct and accurate, I'd be interested if somebody explaining these two divergent descriptions of the lib vs con attitudes.

B

Right, you would get an opposite result at a military school where most kids come from conservative families and 1 in 100 would be from a hippy group. If that kid happened to whine a little you would get the same result.

If a similar study was done in Grand Rapids, MI I am sure you could come up with a polarized result to Berkley CA.

I'm not trying to give any credence to the actual study, but....

I can see where the "buck the system" types of kids would grow up to be more left leaning. When you look at the right all you see are authority figures who love it when you do what they tell you to do.

Whereas the kids who grow up relying on the system to keep them safe, tattletales for instance, seem to learn young that the authorities are fully in charge.

The above statements are based on my observations and I do not claim them to be 100% correct.

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