Liberals Invert Findings To Make Conservatives Look Crazy

A nice little retraction you won’t see covered by the MSM:

Their initial findings reported just that.

“In line with our expectations, [psychoticism] P (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes,” the original paper stated. “Intriguingly, the strength of the relationship between P and political ideology differs across sexes. P’s link with social conservatism is stronger for females while its link with military attitudes is stronger for males.”

“We also find individuals higher in Neuroticism are more likely to be economically liberal,” the paper said. “Furthermore, Neuroticism is completely unrelated to social ideology, which has been the focus of many in the field. Finally, those higher in Social Desirability are also more likely to express socially liberal attitudes.”

However, the authors of the paper, Virginia Commonwealth University researchers Brad Verhulst and Lindon Eaves and Pennsylvania State University researcher Peter Hatemi, had to issue a correction after learning the findings were exactly the opposite.

“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 correction reads. “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,” the researchers 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 rewrite will say, “Not so in line with our expectations,…”

The bit about neuroticism reeks of bullshit. High neuroticism correlates with unhappiness, yet one consistent finding is that conservatives tend to have higher levels of happiness. That, and Trigglypuff, would make me question that.

What they are really seeing there is conscientiousness, itself an outgrowth of amygdala. Conscientiousness is actually normal, but to a liberal it will appear as a neurosis.

Conservatives will get neurotic about paying their bills. They will get neurotic when an armed rapist is in their house. They will get neurotic when their nation is about to collapse into an Apocalypse. That doesn’t mean they are higher in neuroticism than a 500lb human hippopotamus who throws a an earth-shaking fit because the gay guy on stage isn’t spouting liberal platitudes.

To a liberal, if you actually care about things, you must be neurotic. Lacking a functional amygdala, they can’t imagine what it would be like to actually see threats, and feel a cognitive force that would drive you to try and avoid them.

There will come a day when they will wish they had that ability.