Blog 5: Study of Attitudes

I feel like I grew up with a fairly balanced political and religious background, or at least unique. My mom grew up in a large Irish Catholic family, stop practicing as a young adult and became extremely liberal, and then slowly became conservative throughout my life. My dad was raised in Waco as a fundamentalist Baptist, moved to Austin and became a liberal hippie as soon as he could, and as he aged I think he became more liberal and more of an atheist. Therefore, I feel like I got a taste of most perspectives (plus I still had Catholic and Baptist family members influencing me from either side of the family). Somehow I turned out relatively conservative, and became increasingly conservative when I decided to be baptised Catholic (my mom also returned to the Church). There was great religious and political dichotomy in my family when I was in high school. My dad was a raging liberal and atheist and both my mom and I were fairly avid republicans and Catholics. College, however, changed everything. As supported by past and continuing research (the new Astin study), people tend to become more liberal in college. I sould have been a participant in Newcomb's (1943) study, because, in keeping with his findings, I started out fairly conservative and experienced a very liberal shift in my thinking. Now we just have to wait and see what happens after college! Prior to college, I firmly believed in God, and in the Catholic doctrine (well, most of it), I was not in favor of abortion, the death penalty, premarital sex, etc. Upon starting my college career though, I slowly began to question all of these beliefs. I stopped going to Church mostly because I couldn't find the time and because it seemed like most people didn't go. Then I realized one day that I didn't believe in original sin, and after that it was kind of downhill for Catholicism. After that I began to question my political beliefs. I felt more free to change my mind after deciding I wasn't a Catholic. I will admit, I'm still fiscally conservative and that probably won't change a whole lot. Socially though, I am light years more liberal than I ever could have imagined, and the most I can say spiritually is that I feel like there must be some kind of higher power, but that is pretty much the extent of my faith. So, as predicted by Newcomb, I have experienced a liberal shift in college, and I guess next year I'm supposed to start becoming slightly more conservative again? We'll see...


Newcomb, T. M. (1943). Personality and social change: Attitude formation in a student community. Ft. Worth, TX: Dryden Press.