News You Can Use From Berkley

A recent study has suggested that our political leanings as adults could depend on our personalities as children. More specifically, insecure, whiny kids tend to grow up to be conservatives, while self-reliant children tend to be liberals. The article is generally panned by both Dr. Helen and Dr. Sanity.

ShrinkWrapped, whom both draw from, takes a more scientific--and cautionary--approach to the article:

First I would suggest we be careful about accepting a reporter's view of a research study that does not include a link to the original. This should be an absolute minimal expectation of any on-line article, and URLs should be included even in old media reports. The absence of a URL is instructive.

Even more significant is the possibility that the Social Scientist may well have gathered some evidence that anxious children grow up to be rigid, perhaps authoritarian, adults. That does not preclude the delicious possibility that Block, without any conscious awareness, has described a situation in which he unknowingly inverted the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative."

But even the article in question does cast some doubt on the findings it touts:

Jost welcomed the new study, saying it lends support to his conclusions. But Jeff Greenberg, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona who was critical of Jost's study, was less impressed.

"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.

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?

What's more, the article does call the statistical relevence the study itself into question:

Part of the answer is that personality is not the only factor that determines political leanings. 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. (If every self-reliant kid became a liberal and none became conservatives, it would predict 100 per cent of the variance). Seven per cent is fairly strong for social science, but it still leaves an awful lot of room for other influences, such as friends, family, education, personal experience and plain old intellect. (Emphasis added)

In other words, they're admitting that social science is a rather weak discipline.

I for one don't plan to get my boxers in a knot over this study. It is interesting to note, however, how much fun the writer (a freelancer) seems over the results before they settle down and look at the study more critically and responsibly. Oh well. One of the main tenets in the writing business is to know your audience. One of the main tenets of the PR industry is that all exposure is good exposure. No doubt this fellow is getting a fair amount of exposure just now.