WHO IS A CONSERVATIVE???

I listen to gasbag radio and often read AOL political message boards and I'm starting to think that many, perhaps most, American conservatives have a personality disorder. I've decided to poke around the academic psychological literature and post some of the findings here.


Nursery school personality and political orientation two decades later
Jack Block and Jeanne H. Block
Journal of Research in Personality Volume 40, Issue 5 , October 2006, Pages 734-749
Department of Psychology, MC 1650,
University of California, Berkeley,
94720-1650, USA

The present study reports on the personality attributes of nursery school children who two decades later were reliably stratified along a liberal/conservative dimension. An unprecedented analytical opportunity existed to evaluate how the political views of these young adults related to assessments of them when in nursery school, prior to their having become political beings. Preschool children who 20 years later were relatively liberal were characterized as: developing close relationships, self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, relatively under-controlled, and resilient. Preschool children subsequently relatively conservative at age 23 were described as: feeling easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and relatively over-controlled and vulnerable.