Correction: Turns Out Liberals ARE Crazy

The American Journal of Political Science corrects a major error in its 2012 study.

The American Journal of Political Science recently issued a correction to a 2012 study that contained “an error.” And what was this error? Well, to put it succinctly, the Journal reversed its conclusion that politically conservative individuals exhibited traits most associated with “psychoticism,” whereas those of a liberal bent did not. The Journal explained, “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. 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.”

That’s one heck of an “oops.”

The Journal insists that the correction matters little to the paper’s overall conclusion and downplays the new results, stating, “Personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes.” But professor Steven Ludeke of the University of Southern Denmark argues that the error “matters quite a lot.” Ludeke says, “The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction.” We’ll go out on a limb and predict that the correction gets swept under the rug or ignored entirely by the mainstream media.

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