Apparently, the contents of your bedroom may be indicative of your political leanings:
The items at the top correlate with a conservative leaning, while those at the bottom correlate with a liberal leaning. The strength of the correlation is indicated by the number of stars.
Source: Jost, John. “The End of the End of Ideology.” American Psychologist. October 2006. Vol. 61, No. 7, 651–670 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.7.651.
Author: Milan
In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford.
Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.
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What prediction would this table make about your own political leaning based upon the contents of your current bedroom?
What about guns?
For me:
The flags are all quite small (for instance, lapel pins) and not visibly displayed. The alcohol container is the bottle of 94% ethanol that I use for cleaning.
I do have guns, but only of the Nerf variety.
It’s possible to look pretty badass with a Nerf gun.
I guess this makes you a good moderate :-)
My U.S. flag is part of a ’50 Years of NORAD’ commemorative pin, which includes the flags of both countries. It’s only a few millimetres to a side.
The small print says these data are based on an analysis of college students and recent graduates. I’d be more interested to see a correlation based on the possessions of people whose living space includes more rooms than a bedroom.
Nora, thanks for reading and explaining the small print. As a 55 year old living in a house with only about three of the stated items in our bedroom, I could not relate the information to myself.
Milan, you on the other hand have so many items – not only are you the bad-ass Nerf gun carrying moderate, I imagine you were also first in line at the BEST Buy Black Friday sales.
Living on a TA stipend, I choose to avoid extravagances like taking the subway instead of walking and eating meals on Sunday (when none are provided by Massey). I am certainly not adding to my stock of electronic gadgets.
Nora’s point may be especially applicable to me, as essentially everything I own is in my bedroom.
Here’s a calculation I would like to see: the relationship between the amount of digital storage in someone’s bedroom and their political leanings.
Given that most digital storage consists of movies and music, there would probably be a pretty strong correlation between ‘Varied CDs’ and the number of gigabytes of storage present in the room.
If I add up my iPod (160 GB) with my iPhone (16 GB) along with my iMac (750 GB) and my laptop (1 terabyte) and the backup drives for each of them, I am in the neighbourhood of 3.5 terabytes of storage. On top of that are all my digital camera memory cards.
(For comparison, the hard drive on the first computer owned by my family was 170 megabytes. Now, the main memory card for my digital camera holds nearly 100 times more data, and my total collection of digital media has capacity for around 20,000 times as much.)