Evan Bayh: Whiny as a kid?-->

Jim Lindgren at the Volokh Conspiracy notes some interesting aspects of the Berkley nursery school study which associated "whiny kids" with the development of cringing, fearful conservatives.

Skepticism is merited if only for the blatant political nature of the study (the politicization of the social "sciences" is an absolute scandal, but that's another post...), but this one may have gone out of its way to obtain the "correct" result.

According to Michelle Malkin, all the kids were apparently the offspring of U.C. Berkley faculty and staff. Lindgren reflects:

In the 1972 General Social Survey, only 3% of the general public had post-graduate or professional degrees. I find it hard to believe that a nursery school open only to Berkeley faculty and staff would be at all representative of the general public. (Judging from the University of Chicago's Laboratory School, whose towers I am gazing at this moment and whose classes my daughter attended from nursery school through high school, the students there were largely from families with one or more post-graduate degrees.) If the nursery school where data was collected was made up almost entirely of university kids (and I know nothing about this other than Malkin's post), then the Blocks should have informed readers how skewed in terms of education and social class the sample was. They should not have pointed readers in the opposite direction by calling the sample "heterogeneous with respect to social class and parents' educational level."

Last, if the data were collected in what was in effect one nursery school open only to the children of Berkeley faculty and staff, a liberal group if ever there was one, then it tends to support my earlier hypothesis that the sample may have so few conservatives or Republicans that the study mostly distinguishes the political left from the political center--i.e., it distinguishes the 40% of Democrats in the general public who are liberal from the other 60% of Democrats who are not.

This supports the point I made in my original post on the issue:

The reality is that the Berkley study has no bearing on people's political affliations. Some Democrats are, in terms of the study, "conservatives", and many Republicans are "liberal".