Being more conservative was often thought to be a by-product of age and wisdom. But now a new study suggests having children and being interested in caring for them, can also make one more conservative.
The Daily Mail reports the study, led by Nicholas Kerry, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The research team found a link between people having children and holding conservative values, relating to social issues, including abortion, immigration, sex, and national security.
“{We found} evidence that both parenthood and parental care motivation are associated with increased social conservatism around the globe,” the researchers wrote.
This shoots down the old theory that merely growing older would make one more conservative.
“A common lay assumption is that people tend to become more conservative with age as a consequence of greater wisdom and experience, as reflected in the saying ‘whoever is not a liberal at 20 has no heart, and whoever is not a conservative at 30 has no brain’ (with various alternatives attributed to John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill, King Oskar II of Sweden and Victor Hugo,” the researchers wrote in their introduction.
“If the finding that parenthood explains age differences in social conservatism is generalizable beyond American online samples, this would suggest that parenthood, rather than wisdom, maybe at the root of age differences in political attitudes and could be among the most important demographic predictors of ideology,” researchers wrote.
“There is this idea that as you get older you become more conservative from experience and from being bitten by the real world,” Dr. Kerry told The Guardian. “But it doesn’t seem to be the case. If you look at people who are not parents, you just do not see an age difference.”
The research team performed several experiments for the study, exploring the link between having children and one’s political values, according to The Mail.
One experiment included a survey of more than 2,600 adults from 10 countries around the world, including the U.S., South Korea, Australia, Chile, Lebanon and Japan.
All of the study’s subjects indicated how they were inclined to care for their children and their level of conservatism. Their conservatism was measured by their attitudes on topics including gay marriage, sex before marriage, abortion rights, welfare benefits, and “military and national security.”
Once completed, researchers found that people with children, and those motivated to care for children, were more socially conservative than those who didn’t have any children, according to The Mail.
Another experiment involved almost 400 college students in the U.S. Almost all of the students didn’t have any children. The students were shown photographs of young children by the research team, and were asked to tell which of the children “most resembled how they imagined a future child of theirs to look.”
The students were also told to give this child an imaginary name and describe theoretical positive experiences for them. Then the researcher determined their conservative values.
The researchers found that those who were more motivated to care for the child tended to have those more socially conservative values, according to The Mail.
One of the study’s limitations, according to the outlet, is that it was correlational, so the team “cannot confidently conclude that parenthood itself causes social conservatism.”
The researchers also made a point on how future research should be focused.
“More focused future research should seek to establish whether having multiple young family members is sufficient to change political beliefs, or whether engaging (or investing) in childcare is a necessary component,” they wrote.
The research team said caring about children has a direct connection to social attitudes.
“The motivation to care for children is consequently among the fundamental drivers of human behavior, but its power to shape social attitudes and cognition is underappreciated. Here, we found cross-cultural and experimental evidence suggesting that parental care motivation leads to increases in socially conservative attitudes, and that parenthood is associated with social conservatism around the globe,” the researchers concluded.
According to The Guardian, the team’s findings were backed up by an analysis of data from the World Values Survey, collected over a 40-year period and involving 426,444 participants in 88 countries, which additionally suggested the more children parents had, the more socially conservative they tended to be.
But in countries like India and Pakistan, parenting was not linked to being more conservative.
Other experts are not convinced of the connection.
Professor Paul Higgs of University College London warned that the study reduces political orientation to one specific set of personal experiences, just as the trope about an older age connection to conservative values did, according to The Guardian. Nor does it take into account the changing nature of later life or consider how social conservatism may be affected by changes in society or in social roles.
Kerry told the outlet that while there was a wealth of research on parenting and its effect on children, there was far less exploring the impact of parenthood itself.
“I think that research like this demonstrates that when your motivations, your goals, your priorities, change, that influences your broader values,” he said.
“Understanding that point is important in realizing that maybe people you disagree with a bit aren’t just stupid and evil… Those people might have been shaped by just their situation in life and what their motivations and goals are,” Kerry noted.
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