Psychology Today: Childhood markers for Liberals & Conservatives

[groovychk]

Originally published at Twixel.net. You can comment here or there.

Psychology Today: The Ideological Animal

“All people are born alike-except Republicans and Democrats,” quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children’s temperaments. They weren’t even thinking about political orientation.

Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects’ childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
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This kind of thing really does make it difficult to have hope sometimes.

Comments

[kyrie1618.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. This I did not see coming.

I'm oddly cheered by this, and this is why. We know that when people get scared they turn into warmongers. Maybe this means warmongering is a treatable illness. With a combination of exercise, fiber, understanding, and therapy, maybe people can *become* pacifist.

Just as certain groups manipulate people into being violent, maybe we can make ourselves better. By making good friends, by changing the way we see the world -- to become the change we want to see.