Here's something worth whining about!

A new "scientific" (that word again) study shows that whiny, complaining children grow up to be conservative, while children described as "confident, resilient, self-reliant" 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.

Maybe it's because as a child I wasn't what they call "confident":

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.

Block admits in his paper that liberal Berkeley is not representative of the whole country. But within his sample, he says, the results hold. He reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

In a society that values self-confidence and out-goingness, it's a mostly flattering picture for liberals. It also runs contrary to the American stereotype of wimpy liberals and strong conservatives.

Considering the degeneration of the terminology, how are "liberal" and "conservative" being defined? Is not rigidity of thinking to be found at both ends of the political spectrum? That was the reaction of Jeff Greenberg, a critic of the study:

"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.

But is that always the case? Can we be so sure that insecure, defensive, and rigid personalities like Michael Moore and Pat Robertson were always that way? Can't these things also be a result of life experiences?

And what are the implications for Churchill's famous remark:

Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.

And while I try to state what I think as clearly as I can, I feel anything but "confident" -- because I distrust false confidence.

What puzzles me the most about the study is the statement that "the more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are."

The way what things are? What way is that? Remember, this study was done in Berkeley, hardly a bastion of political conservatism. A place where "liberals" (a term I hate to use to characterize the hard left) are not known for being "eager to explore alternatives." Especially alternatives to whining.

(I don't know, but I'm not feeling confident enough to be rigid.)

UPDATE (03/23/06): Via Glenn Reynolds, Michelle Malkin provides the full text of the study. And InstaWife Dr. Helen asks a good question:

What about people who change their political orientation over time--were they really just whiny kids or self-reliant ones originally who fooled themselves?

(My inner child has been whining about self reliance for years...)