Political Psychology

I've been meaning to post this for a couple days now. While my Internet was down, I decided to skim through a couple of my new textbooks in the hopes that I would actually be studying something remotely interesting this semester. In my psychology book, I found an interesting section about mental development. I'm going to put the important part here and then explain why it has political meaning. See if you can figure out where I'm going with this:

Children's Theory of Mind: Their Understanding that Others Can Hold Different Beliefs Than They Do

If young children (e.g., three-year-olds) are told the story depicted here (note from CD: The story is a 6 panel cartoon in which a child places a candy bar in a box and leaves, and then his mother puts it in a different box, effectively confusing the child when he returns to look for it), they predict that the character in the story will look for the candy where his mother left it. They don't understand that what they know can be different from what the story character knows, or that he can hold mistaken beliefs. Four-year-olds, however, predict that the character will look where he left the candy, thus demonstrating their growing understanding of how others, and they, think.

Hmmmm...can you say "liberals," children? Maybe all this time, what we thought was elitism has actually been mental immaturity.

Expect a lot more applied psychology like this as the semester goes on. I found a few other items that could be applied to liberals, but I don't feel like looking for them right now.