New research from psychological scientist R. Chris Fraley of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and colleagues suggest that parenting practices and childhood temperament may play an influential role<\/strong>. Their study is published online in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n Existing research suggests that individuals whose parents espoused authoritarian attitudes toward parenting (e.g., valuing obedience to authority) are more likely to endorse conservative values as adults. And theory from political psychology on motivated social cognition suggests that children who have fearful temperaments may be more likely to hold conservative ideologies as adults. Unfortunately, almost all of the existing research looking at these two factors suffers from significant methodological shortcomings<\/strong>. Specifically, the majority of this research has been retrospective\u2014relying on adult\u2019s recollections of their early temperaments and their early caregiving experiences.<\/p>\n To better understand the developmental antecedents of political ideology, Fraley and his colleagues examined data from 708 children who originally participated in the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development\u2019s (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD).<\/p>\n When the children in the study were one month old, their parents answered questions from the Parental Modernity Inventory. Fraley and colleagues used their responses to determine the degree to which the parents demonstrated authoritarian (e.g., \u201cChildren should always obey their parents\u201d) and egalitarian parenting attitudes (e.g., \u201cChildren should be allowed to disagree with their parents\u201d).<\/p>\n The dataset also included mothers\u2019 assessments of their children\u2019s temperaments when they were 4.5 years old, using questions from the Children\u2019s Behavior Questionnaire. From these assessments, the researchers identified five temperament factors: restlessness-activity, shyness, attentional focusing, passivity, and fear.<\/p>\n Consistent with theory from political psychology, Fraley and colleagues found that children with authoritarian parents were more likely to have conservative attitudes at age 18<\/strong>, even after accounting for their gender, ethnic background, cognitive functioning, and socioeconomic status. Children who had parents with egalitarian parenting attitudes, on the other hand, were more likely to hold liberal attitudes as young adults.<\/p>\n In terms of temperament, children with higher levels of fearfulness at 54 months were more likely to be conservative at age 18, while children with higher levels of activity or restlessness and higher levels of attentional focusing were more likely to espouse liberal values at that age.<\/p>\n The researchers argue that their work has wide-ranging implications for understanding the variation in political orientation. According to Fraley, \u201cOne of the significant challenges in psychological science is understanding the multiple pathways underlying personality development. Our research suggests that variation in how people feel about diverse topics, ranging from abortion, military spending, and the death penalty, can be traced to both temperamental differences that are observable as early as 54 months of age<\/strong>, as well as variation in the attitudes people\u2019s parents have about child rearing and discipline.\u201d They believe that an important direction for future research will be to delve deeper into exploring the underlying mechanisms \u2013 including shared genetic variation and parent-child conflict \u2013 that might link parenting attitudes and temperament to later political ideology.<\/p>\n \u201cWe hope that this work will help enrich theory at the interface of political and personality science but also underscore the value of studying these issues from a developmental perspective,\u201d the authors write.<\/p>\n The study was co-authored by Brian Griffin of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Jay Belsky of the University of California, Davis, King Abdulaziz University, and Birkbeck, University of London; and Glenn Roisman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: Political mindsets are the product of an individual\u2019s upbringing, life experiences, and environment. But are there specific experiences that lead a person… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[319,9],"tags":[254,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7549"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7768,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7549\/revisions\/7768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mother](\"http:\/\/www.therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/MotherandChildren.jpg\")
Political mindsets are the product of an individual\u2019s upbringing, life experiences, and environment. But are there specific experiences that lead a person to choose one political ideology over another?<\/strong><\/p>\n