The Patriot Post® · Anti-Conservative Study Given Wrong Diagnosis
Conservatives, relax. You’re not as authoritarian as previously told in the 2012 study, “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies.” Truth be told, “P” tendencies — shorthand for “Psychoticism” — are actually more likely to show up among your more liberal friends.
The study initially claimed that “P (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes,” whereas “individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal.” Moreover, “[T]hose higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.”
Except, no, that’s not at all true. Take a moment to reflect on this damning revision that was discretely released this past January:
> “The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of ‘Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies’… The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.”
Oops. One of the researchers, Brad Verhulst, told The Washington Free Beacon “The correction to the original manuscript was quite minor, and consisted of an error in the descriptives. None of the primary conclusions were affected by the error.”
Fair enough. But that doesn’t change the impression fomented by the study.
In 2007, Mark Alexander wrote a rebuttal to a similar study that likewise casts conservatives as nitwits. As he explained, “Liberals are uniformly defined by their hypocrisy and dissociation from reality. … Liberals speak of unity, but they seed foment, appealing to the worst in human nature by dividing Americans into dependent constituencies. … Liberals constantly assert their First Amendment rights, except, of course, when it comes to religion or speech that does not agree with their own.” And the list goes on. The reason? “Psychopathology dictates, or frames, worldview, and worldview manifests in such things as political affiliation. Liberal pathology is very transparent and, thus, well defined.”
David French wryly asks, “Everyone knows conservatives are the real authoritarians, so this wrong study has to be wrong. Or was the wrong study right? It’s hard to keep up when the ‘science’ keeps shifting.” But wait — isn’t the science always settled? Eh, what do we know.