Were conservatives whiny children?

Michelle Maitre, STAFF WRITER

Got an indecisive, fearful kid who loves order and cries when things go haywire?

You could have a budding conservative on your hands.

If your child is a free-spirited chatterbox, you may be looking at a future liberal.

That, at least, is the finding of a study by a University of California, Berkeley, professor that suggests adults' political leanings have correlations to personality traits we exhibit as children.

Children who at age 4 were described by their teachers as "self- reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under- controlled and resilient" identified as politically liberal 20 years later.

Conversely, children described as "feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable" favored conservative politics when they grew up.

Author Jack Block, an emeritus psychology professor at UC Berkeley, based the results on longitudinal data from a study he started in 1969 of 128 children at nursery schools in Berkeley and Oakland. About 20 years later, he caught up with some of the students again, and looked at correlations between their early personality traits and their self-professed political leanings.

His research, to be published in the Journal of Research in Personality, is based on data from 95 of the students, 49 women and 46 men.

In his introduction, Block said his long-term research allows an opportunity for an "unusual empirical study" into the implications of character and political orientation. He was able to look at personality traits exhibited before children became politically aware -- something other studies haven't been able to do.

But the study -- first discussed in a March 19 Toronto Star article -- has drawn political fire aplenty from conservative columnists and bloggers. Critics include UC Berkeley's student Republican group, who blast it for shoddy research and political bias.

"I question the validity of the study," said James Fullmer, 19, a business administration major at UC Berkeley and managing editor of the California Patriot, a student-run conservative magazine. The magazine has published an online editorial criticizing the study and has scheduled it as a discussion topic on student-run California Patriot Radio.

Fullmer said the study draws too many conclusions from such a small group of people from liberal Berkeley.

"The Berkeley area is very politically skewed in one direction," Fullmer said. "One would expect conservative children to be a little more insecure than liberal children."

Fullmer said he's bothered that university money could have supported the study, but Block said he didn't get any financial support from UC. If anything, Block said in an e-mail, the university benefited financially because the study brought in "appreciable overhead funds." The study was supported by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health.

Block declined to be interviewed, but his study outlines how personality plays into politics. The less secure children tend to gravitate toward decisive leaders "who are presumed to have special and security-enhancing knowledge," Block wrote. The free-spirits, on the other hand, "will often encounter in the everyday world constraints and frustrations that do not appear to be sensibly or societally required" and will gravitate toward "alternative political principles oriented toward achieving a better life for all."

Even as adults, conservatives and liberals exhibited similar group traits, the study said. The conservative young men and women tended to be conventional, uneasy with uncertainty and moralistic, with the women especially considered "emotionally bland" and the men being quick to offer unasked-for advice.

Liberals, on the other hand, were non-conforming, bright and had wide interests.

Those traits, however, may hurt liberal causes in the end: "Ironically, the sheer variety of changes and improvements suggested by the liberal-minded under-controller may explain the diffuseness, and subsequent ineffectiveness, of liberals in politics where a collective single-mindedness of purpose so often is required," Block wrote.

Fullmer said the traits don't conform to students -- both conservative and liberal -- he knows at Berkeley.

"Most of the really whiny and insecure kids at Cal are the ones doing leftist activism," Fullmer said, "but I'm not trying to say all liberals are whiny."

Block wrote that his study can deepen understanding of the roots of political ideology.

"The present findings may have tapped into some important aspects of liberalism/conservatism," he wrote. "The study is too limited by itself to admit of extensive efforts at rationalization of the dynamics between personality and political persuasion. But the findings may contribute a context for understanding that will be deeper psychologically and politically."

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