People do not inevitably grow more conservative with age

Evidence

Finally, I am also impressed by the direction of the change. Because of the large amounts of university experience these people had, their RWA scores dropped a lot. Parenthood ratcheted these scores back up, but even the parents remained significantly less authoritarian than they were as young adults. Although this may disappear once the children hit adolescence, I find it remarkable that these “thirty-somethings” were still less authoritarian than they had been at age eighteen. (Remember the warning, “Never trust anyone over thirty”?) We do not, it seems, inevitably grow more conservative as we grow older. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 1140

Categorization

• XREF: Directly engages the common claim that aging shifts people rightward, relevant to generational accounts of Christian-nationalist support. — connects to: Younger generations proved more willing than older ones to convert discontent into public anger. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2127
• QUESTION: Altemeyer flags that adolescent children may reverse the effect — worth chasing whether life-stage mediation explains adult RWA in longitudinal samples.