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Are our politics determined by our genetics?

Courtesy of the Business Insider:

Among the first scientists to dig for the roots of political orientation were a couple of pioneering psychologists in California named Jack and Jeanne Block. Back in 1969, the Blocks asked two challenging questions: How deep do our political leanings run? And how early in life do these leanings begin to form within each of us?

In search of answers, they devised a very unusual study, and they began it with kids who were still in nursery school. On the face of it, the premise of the study seemed absurd: What did nursery school kids know about Democrats or Republicans, or about the complicated, hot-button issues of the day? Still, the Blocks were serious researchers from the University of California at Berkeley, and they were determined to break new ground.

For their experiment, the two professors placed a group of 128 nursery-school children under the close observation of several teachers for a period of seven months. Then the Blocks had each of these caretakers measure the three-year-olds' personalities and social interactions, using a single standardized test. The same children then underwent this process again at age four, with a different set of teachers at a second nursery school. The Blocks tabulated the scores for each child and then locked the numbers away in a vault.

The test scores then sat in the vault for the next two decades, while the children from the study went their separate ways in life. They grew up, completed their educations, and turned into young adults. After 20 years had passed, the Blocks succeeded in tracking down 95 of their original 128 subjects, in the hope of measuring how liberal or conservative each of them had become. This time they asked the young adults, now age 24, to situate themselves on a five-point political spectrum. They also asked them to express their opinions on a number of highly partisan, hot-button issues. In particular, several of these questions measured their tolerance of inequality between the genders and between different racial groups. In addition, they were asked to describe any political activism they might have participated in during the intervening years.

The results, published in 2006 by the Journal of Research in Personality, were astonishing. In analyzing their data, the Blocks found a clear set of childhood personality traits that accurately predicted conservatism in adulthood. For instance, at the ages of three and four, the "conservative" preschoolers had been described as "uncomfortable with uncertainty," as "rigidifying when experiencing duress," and as "relatively over-controlled." The girls were "quiet, neat, compliant, fearful and tearful, [and hoped] for help from the adults around."

Likewise, the Blocks pinpointed another set of childhood traits that were associated with people who became liberals in their mid-twenties. The "liberal" children were more "autonomous, expressive, energetic, and relatively under-controlled." Liberal girls had higher levels of "self-assertiveness, talkativeness, curiosity, [and] openness in expressing negative feelings."

Now as many of you here know, I love me some science. However I have some real questions about the veracity of this study since I think we all know of people who have once been conservative and who are much more liberal later in life, and vice versa.

However I do recognize, and have personally tracked, data from very young children which is a strong indicator for who they will be later in life.

So I will leave this as an open question, and encourage all of you to weigh in with your opinion.

I will offer my daughter's opinion from a conversation we had yesterday, and that is that it is all about education, and being exposed to different sources of information. For her the dumber you are, the more conservative you are, and the smarter you are, the more right you will be.

You know I kind of love that young woman.

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