Science Says Liberals Are Psychotic
The American Journal of Political Science published a correction several months back saying that it made a serious error in one of it’s published papers.
The error? The paper originally said that conservative political beliefs are linked to “psychoticism,” but it turns out that liberal political beliefs are the ones that are linked to psychoticism.
From The New York Post:
A political-science journal that published an oft-cited study claiming conservatives were more likely to show traits associated with “psychoticism” now says it got it wrong. Very wrong.
The American Journal of Political Science published a correction this year saying that the 2012 paper has “an error” — and that liberal political beliefs, not conservative ones, are actually linked to psychoticism.
“The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed,” the journal said in the startling correction.
“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.”
Traits that are associated with psychoticism include risk taking, sensation seeking, impulsiveness, and authoritarianism.
The article says that erroneous report was cited at least 45 times according to Thomson Reuters Web of Science.
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