A scientific study that examined the connection between personality traits and political beliefs as an adult has been supporting the false notion that conservatives are more "uncooperative, hostile, troublesome and socially withdrawn" in addition to "manipulative."
The study, entitled "Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies," was conducted in 2012 by Brad Verhulst and Lindon Eaves of Virginia Commonwealth University and Peter Hatemi of Penn State University.
The authors had originally concluded that:
[Psychoticism] P (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.
They later corrected their statements in January, but the changes went unnoticed until this past Tuesday. Luckily Retraction Watch caught wind of the research adjustments.
As The Daily Caller put it:
...social conservatism was associated with psychotic traits such as interpersonal aggression, hostility, impulsiveness, and more, while liberalism was associated with “social desirability,” which in the paper represents a desire to get along with others.
Can you imagine the field day that liberals had when the study was published? Retraction Watch, a blog that mentions errors in the world of academia, reported that the paper has been cited 45 times.
What's perhaps most interesting is that the study's authors stated in their corrections that that the published results were "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.
When the Washington Free Beacon contacted the authors, Verhulst responded by saying the error was "quite minor."
Excuse me, but no it was not. For the past three years, liberals familiar with the study have been able to go around saying, "Conservatives are the psychotic ones, and I have scientific evidence to back it up!"
Although the researchers stated that a "high Psychoticism score is not a diagnosis of being clinically psychotic or psychopathic," I think we can all safely assume that didn't stop liberals from claiming all conseratives are psychos.