I was sent this article the other day. Pretty interesting.

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 de cades 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.

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 value s 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.

Of course, if you're studying the psychology of politics, you shouldn't
be surprised to get a political reaction. Similar work by John T. Jost
of Stanford and colleagues in 2003 drew a political backlash. The
researchers reviewed 44 years worth of studies into the psychology of
conservatism, and concluded that people who are dogmatic, fearful,
intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty, and who crave order and
structure are more likely to gravitate to conservatism. Critics branded
it the "conservatives are crazy" study and accused the authors of a
political bias.

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 (the Jack Block study) to be biased, shoddy work, poor science
at best'

"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?

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.

For conservatives whose feelings are still hurt, there is a more
flattering way for them to look at the results. Even if they really did
tend to be insecure complainers as kids, they might simply have
recognized that the world is a scary, unfair place.

Their grown-up c onclusion that the safest thing is to stick to
tradition could well be the right one. As for their "rigidity," maybe
that's just moral certainty.

The grown-up liberal men, on the other hand, with their introspection
and recognition of complexity in the world, could be seen as
self-indulgent and ineffectual.

Whether anyone's feelings are hurt or not, the work suggests that
personality and emotions play a bigger role in our political leanings
than we think. All of us, liberal or conservative, feel as though we've
reached our political opinions by carefully weighing the evidence and
exercising our best judgment. But it could be that all of that careful
reasoning is just after-the-fact self-justification. What if
personality forms our political outlook, with reason coming along
behind, rationalizing after the fact?

It could be that whom we vote for has less to do with our judgments
about tax policy or free t rade or health care, and more with the
personalities we've been stuck with since we were kids.

Kurt Kleiner is a Toronto-based freelance science writer.