Predicting Political Preferences

I came across the results of an interesting psychology study the other day:

When participants were in preschool, they were evaluated on a variety of personality dimensions by their preschool teachers who had been trained in personality assessment. Twenty years after preschool, the researchers asked these now young adults to complete some self-report questionnaires assessing political beliefs.

Children who were described by their teachers 20 years previously as being easily offended, indecisive, fearful, and rigid were more likely to be politically conservative in their twenties. Children who had been described as being self-reliant, energetic, somewhat dominating, and relatively undercontrolled in preschool grew up to be more liberal.