Who would have guessed that a study conforming to every liberal media narrative about conservatives would turn out to be complete and utter garbage?
It turns out that the study, titled “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” got its conclusions switched, meaning what it determined to be personality traits of conservatives were actually the personality traits of liberals.
The paper originally stated that, “In line with our expectations, P [for “Psychoticism”] (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.”
Surprise! The authors set out believing conservatives were authoritarian and they “proved” they were right.
The study further found that liberals were more likely to be neurotic and get along with other people.
“We also find individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal. Furthermore, Neuroticism is completely unrelated to social ideology, which has been the focus of many in the field,” the authors wrote in 2012. “Finally, those higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.”
“Social Desirability,” in social science terms, relates to the tendency of respondents to want to answer in a way that others would view favorably.
But hold on there, because it turns out the researchers completely mixed up their conclusions. “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the researchers wrote in the January 2016 copy of the American Journal of Political Science – four years after the study was published there.
“Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response,” the correction said. “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.”
The researchers tried to downplay the significance of this error by arguing it didn’t matter what the conclusions were, they were only interested in the “magnitude of the relationship and the source of it.”
Yeah, okay.
The correction was first noticed by Retraction Watch on Tuesday, which regularly watches for these kinds of things.
This is yet another example of why you should take studies that perfectly prove a particular narrative with a grain of salt.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
