Dems and Reps at age 3?

I'm not an especialist in this area, so I can't put my finger on it. But my nose tells me there is something fishy about it. Just from personal experience. I used to be quite asocial when I was a kid, and still turned out to become quite liberal by most standards...

I think this is a position that can hardly stand up against close scrutinity. I don't see conservatives as not caring about other people, or selfish. They just have a stiff neck that makes them see things black and white. It's hard for them to think outside of thge box, when the subject is social interaction.

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I'm not an especialist in this area, so I can't put my finger on it. But my nose tells me there is something fishy about it. Just from personal experience. I used to be quite asocial when I was a kid, and still turned out to become quite liberal by most standards...

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Er, anecdotal evidence is meaningless, you know.And the study doesn't claim a perfect correlation.

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I don't see conservatives as not caring about other people, or selfish.

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I do.

O c'mon, fallacycop, read your post and call out the fallacies! You're first arguing from personal incredulity and then you try to refute a general trend with an single anecdote!It's a single study, and it's a GREAT study in that it raises productive research questions. Does this apply equally to social and economic views? Does this interact with the local political landscape (the study was conducted in a liberal area - what about conservative areas?). What about the intervening life-experiences - how do they interact with early personality characteristics?That fact that these questions are raised is a *strength* of the study, not a weakness.There's no single study that "proves" evolution, and there won't a single study that explains how we develop our political attitudes.Edited by Zhimbo, : grammar.

AnglagardRe: Researcher bias.Remember, the early part of this study was NOT about political views. It was a mass study designed to produce a longitudinal database on a large number of personality traits, etc., to look at issues like stability of traits, etc.Only 20 years later were political views entered into the study! So while various forms of biases may creep into the data (such as a biased sample, as the authors themselves clearly describe), it seems like an awful stretch to suggest that the researchers unconsciously designed the original study to be unflattering to conservatives 20 years later.The study raises all sorts of questions, such as some you have raised, but those questions are GOOD! That's a sign of a promising and productive line of research. See my previous post to fallacycop.

I'm not doing any of that. I'm not arguing anything, I'm not refuting anything, I'm not even saying I don't believe it. I'm just relaying to you what my nose is telling me. I won't be ofended if you decide to totally ignore it (That's what I would do in your place). But to me, it smells fishy.

That's too bad.

I know that. I'm not claiming anything. I'm just telling you what my nose is telling me. That's all...

Well, OK. Fishiness is in the nose of the beholder. Or, smeller.Certainly I would never fully accept strong conclusions on the basis of this study alone, but some of my recent reading suggests its fitting into a cohesive body of data. Ultimately I don't think "democrat" and "republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" are going to be the best psychological descriptions, but it's a useful start, I think.

...remember that these are correlational data, with all the usual caveats, and that while some of the correlations are strong by social-psych standards (r=.5 or so), even these "strong" correlations only explain about 25% of the total variance in the data - so while they're statistically "real" correlations that are plenty interesting, there is still plenty of unexplained variability.Professional psychologists know this intuitively when reading these studies (or they should), but people who read summaries tend to think that these studies are making much stronger claims than they actually are.

That's not the point.The research findings indicate that at some stage in their developement, insecure children turned toward an authoritarian source/view.What the research did not do is rule out any other factors in the choices made. It is not difficult to make the leap from insecurity to a comfort zone, but I don't know why the comfort zone would always be the same 'conservative' politics.Once before you mentioned that people tend to prefer landscapes that depict scenes close to food and water supplies. I never asked you the particulars of that study, but it struck me at the time as very fishy too. How is it possible to say the 'food and water' aspect was more important than maybe the art or photography of the scenes, the color schemes (warm or cool, comforting colors, etc.) or the area where the study participants called home?We recently saw a study where a link was made between young children and a preference for attractive faces. I am not sure how much worse we could get in terms of bias, or how much more such a study could depend on the time or decade in which it was done. What is or is not attractive changes very often!I do understand that these types of studies are starting points. It is the way they are marketed that gets to me. If for example the 'attractiveness' study would have been presented as 'What Type of Faces Are Children Attracted To?' and the results analyzed, I would have no issue compared to a news line which reads 'Children Prefer Attractive Faces'.

Maybe you have to live in the United States to have the view that conservatives, in general, don't care about other people and are selfish.That is certainly (one of) the overriding attitudes of conservatives here.

Irrelevent to that study, yes, but not meaningless.We could find hypothetically as many people who rebelled against the insecurity of childhood while they entered adulthood, as those who stuck to tradition.What this study is saying (sort of) is that none of these children changed or moved past their insecurities. You know as well as I that this does not reflect reality. You likely also know that insecure folks will tend to jump into whatever party line is peresented to them. Wasn't that your argument recently about how so many people become Christian? Looking for a quick fix in college years?

how can you care about people and yet refuse every single attempt to give them aid of any sort?