Don't look at me! No, look at me, look at me. Don't look at me!

Via Jessica Wilson, an article about a study suggesting a link between insecurity displayed in childhood (lack of confidence, whining to nursery school teachers) and political conservatism in adulthood.

[The researcher] reasons that insecure kids look for the reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial.

I find myself somewhat persuaded, plus or minus a few dozen qualifications. But, be that as it may, I'm not too keen on how Wilson follows this up:

Funny -- just the other day I was musing to Benj that a lot would be explained if grown-up right-wingers turned out to have been those creepy kids shunned in high school by all and sundry. Someday, they fumed in their lonely smelly rooms, I'll take my revenge!

Which she then qualified with the following:

Supposing you were shunned in virtue of having the unfortunate conservatism-correlated personality characteristics cited in the above study (and also this study), then I don't see that in being shunned you were a victim of social abuse (ignoring, of course, whatever factors led to your having these characteristics); otherwise, my remarks aren't intended to apply to you.

OK, time for some armchair social science / psychoanalysis.

Basically, I don't think that there's any positive connection at all between a lack of social status in high school (or any stage of life thereafter) and the sort of insecurity picked out by the study. Insecurity that is evident in the nursery school setting could survive the transition into adulthood as an underlying personality trait, without being expressed in any obvious social dysfunction.

Indeed, it seems to me that, as consciousness of social status develops, a person who is fundamentally insecure is going to be especially focused on gaining and maintaining that sort of status. While a relatively secure person could potentially make do with just a couple of friends, a truly insecure person will never be able to collect enough friends or enough social status; and skill at whining (and the closely connected skill of strategic gossiping) can certainly be an effective means to that end. (See e.g. American Beauty.)

Sure, there are also relatively secure people who are just naturally friendly and outgoing. (I think I've met some, and, oh, how I hate them.) But I wonder just how common they are. (My impression is that the social environments found in high school and the business world tend to promote specifically unhealthy forms of gregariousness. So, at least in those contexts, I'd suspect that popular people tend not to be just naturally friendly and outgoing.)

And, sure, an insecure and whiny person could also be a terribly unskilled whiner--in which case he will indeed be socially shunned.

But the point is: if a high school kid is both insecure and shunned, the shunning is not so much a result of the insecurity as it is a result of a failure to develop certain social skills. In high school (and elsewhere), you generally aren't shunned for harbouring deep feelings of insecurity; rather, you're shunned for failing to conform to social norms at the most superficial level possible.