From the friends of Stephan Lewandowsky, and upside-down Mann department
Ralph Dave Westfall submits this story:
Here’s an interesting example of possibly politicized research findings getting blown out of the water: Conservative political beliefs not linked to psychotic traits, as study claimed.
Researchers have fixed a number of papers after mistakenly reporting that people who hold conservative political beliefs are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness.
As one of the notices specifies, now it appears that liberal political beliefs are linked with psychoticism. That paper also swapped ideologies when reporting on people higher in neuroticism and social desirability (falsely claiming that you have socially desirable qualities); the original paper said those traits are linked with liberal beliefs, but they are more common among people with conservative values.
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. 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.
Andrew Gelman, a statistician at Columbia not involved with the work … said:
‘I don’t find this paper at all convincing, indeed I’m surprised it was accepted for publication by a leading political science journal. The causal analysis doesn’t make any sense to me, and some of the things they do are just bizarre, like declaring that correlations are “large enough for further consideration” if they are more than 0.2 for both sexes. Where does that come from? The whole thing is a mess.’
Pete Hatemi, a political scientist at Penn State University and co-author on three of the papers, explained why the swapped political beliefs and personality traits do not affect the conclusions:
We only cared about the magnitude of the relationship and the source of it … None of our papers actually give a damn about whether it’s plus or minus.
When we asked Hatemi to elaborate on what that magnitude was — how much more likely were people who held conservative or liberal views to exhibit certain traits? — he said:
[T]he correlations are spurious, so the direction or even magnitude is not suitable to elaborate on at all- that’s the point of all our papers and the general findings.
The reversal reminds me of the Alfred Kinsey research which initially indicated that more-educated females were less likely to be orgasmic. Later Kinsey said they had gotten the relationship backward due to calculation and sample size problems. (As reported in The Feminine Mystique (50th Anniversary Edition) by Betty Friedan, pp. 282-283).
The full story: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/06/07/conservative-political-beliefs-not-linked-to-psychotic-traits/
Note by Anthony: This episode reminds me exactly of another Penn-State researcher, Michael Mann, who famously used the Tiljander proxy data upside down in one of his hockey stick papers, and then claimed the sign of the data doesn’t matter, and then after a year of stonewalling, grudgingly corrected it. Must be something in the water at State College, perhaps also in Mt. Beauty, Victoria, Australia. 😉
What does it matter that science is being disgraced, that objective truth is being raped, that knowing something real can no longer be said about anything because political bias is so rampant at colleges and universities, as long as our diaper clad post-graduates get their Ph.Ds and someone else changes their nappies. The credential is all-important, and everyone needs one to get a good government job.
And don’t even THINK about wondering where the /snarkysarc indicator is. I’m serious.
Modern Progressivism is really just counter-culture gone mainstream, so it’s only natural that social malfeasance and deviancy would be an inherent quality – all to be projected upon the parent culture it evolved to parasite off of – a natural reflexive defense mechanism to draw the onus off of the real offenders. Works like a charm once it’s infiltrated schools and popular media – especially when individuality has become vilified in favor of conformity.
Have you ever noticed that the same kids who demanded the right to do their own thing when young, now that they are in control are demanding conformity from everyone else.
In fact they are much more dictatorial and uncompromising then even the most hide bound conservative of their youth.
Absolutely. That was an instrumental factor in my migration from the Left. It’s called hypocrisy.
Unfortunately, it does no good to call a hypocrite, a hypocrite. By definition, they don’t care.
When someone doesn’t understand why limited government is best for a free people, they tend to think in a tyrannical mode and will utilize government power to force compliance among the population.
I suspect that your beliefs don’t matter per se. What does matter is how you came to them. If everything you believe is based on theory and is otherwise divorced from reality, I would say that you are in danger of being a psychopath.
This paper was another item in a body of “peer-reviewed litrachur” that has been built up over a period of years purporting to pathologize conservative thought. See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/are-trump-supporters-authoritarians/
The psycho-boffins have come up with a four-question authoritarianism survey which they claim (a) detects an authoritarian personality and (b) predicts conservative political beliefs. Those scoring low on the index tend towards liberalism. The low-authoritarian-index scores self-sort into the Democrat party while the high-index folks self-sort into the Republican party. Naturally, a number of pejorative labels are applied to the authoritarian/conservative/Republicans and and virtuous labels to the non-authoritarians. The fate of the Republic is seen to be imperiled by the fascistic tendencies of authoritarians.
There was a small problem, however, in the development of this theory. There was a group of people who scored low on the authoritarianism index but nevertheless endorsed conservative political beliefs.
Did they conclude that this group disproved the predictive validity of the authoritarianism index and go back to the drawing board?
Nope. They decided that these people were “latent authoritarians,” saving the theory for further grant applications. Hooray!
These people write papers about “motivated cognition” that pathologize conservatives. Self-awareness score = 0.
So, I intend to gain academic renown with a four-question Gullibility-Stupidity Index(TM) of my own creation. It is intended to identify people who are gullible and stupid enough to fall for history’s most discredited and foolish economic philosophy, the idea that the government can give you free stuff forever and that you never have to work, and that it can all be paid for by the top 1%, who will be happy to continue working their tails off to achieve this social nirvana.
So here is my Gullibility-Stupidity Survey:
1. Do you think that from each according to his ability and to each according to his needs is a good plan?
2. In the story about the Ant and the Grasshopper, who’s side were you on?
3. If you buy something for $3,000 that normally costs $6,000, is your net expenditure zero since you have saved $3,000?
4. Do you agree that all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others?
Follow-up studies/grants will focus on (1) odious personality traits that correlate with high scores, (2) genetic and brain defects that correlate with and perhaps cause high scores (3) the danger to the republic from high scoring people gaining an electoral majority, (4) therapies for the personal, moral, genetic and cognitive defects of those with high scores, and (5) a catalog of the virtuous personality traits that correlate with low scores, which, by pure coincidence, happen to describe me and the people I agree with.
Who’s with me?
@Quinn, you make me wanna jump for joy…
Note how authoritarian regimes try to homogenize society and eliminate freedom. Political correctness is nothing but Newspeak.
Follow-up studies/grants shall be conducted by the following:
The Leon Trotsky Institute Ideological Purity
Pol Pot School of Optometry and Pure Vision
Mengele Genetic Institute for the Racial Purity
Margaret Sanger’s Planned Parenthood of America
Bud
Exactly. 1. No, 2. Ant, 3. No, I spent $3000, which is a better deal than spending $6000. 4. No.
Umm, does this mean my “psychotic traits” are just that ???
Guess I’ve got some more thinking to do.
Get back to you on that.
The whole region around Mount Beauty is well known amongst hippies and university students, for an abundance of hallucinogenic magic mushrooms…
https://www.shroomery.org/forums/showflat.php/Number/18613188#18613188
http://www.prismagazine.com.au/prism-guides/psychedelic-mushrooms-and-you/
Apropos my earlier comment – I had no idea! (Obviously live a sheltered existence.)
the journal of irreproducible results
Which one?
We don’t need a study to confirm what is clearly self-evident:
some things just need no reply — Eugene WR Gallun
Well, it was ‘Friday Funny’ so I thought it was appropriate… 😉
You know, now that I think about, maybe ‘skepticism’ has an image problem? But then again, we have yet to form a platform to subscribe to so…free spirits will never reign I suppose.
The diagnosis is: they need hormone therapy and surgery NOW!
As far as Mann goes…I believe when he was confronted with the fact that he had used the data upside-down, he said the claim was “bizarre.”
Establish that there is something psychologically “wrong” with those who disagree with you and then you have justification to ignore them/”treat” them/”protect” others from them.
Nothing new about the concept. We just use bigger words now.
I have to wonder if those who seek to do such things have an aversion to mirrors? Or maybe they’re like vampires. When they do look in a mirror, they don’t see themselves?
It’s called Experimental Psychology and Lewandowsky is its king. Or court jester….
It’s how Mao and Stalin justified the killing of millions.
Many years ago I was fascinated with the works of Bertrand Russell. I believe I read in one of his books the idea that one should be most suspicious of the beliefs one holds most passionately. Maybe he didn’t use those words but the idea did influence me during my science career. I tried to be particularly suspicious of models I built that produced the results that I had expected.
It is an attitude I believe would benefit the current generation of scientists.
Similarly, more journalists should apply the old saying: “If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.”
Judge a philosophy by its principles. A viable philosophy will be internally, externally, and mutually consistent (i.e. not Pro-Choice — selective, liberal — variable, or progressive — monotonic) as it is applied to reconcile moral and natural imperatives.
Our local weather changes by more than 50 degrees F in ONE DAY all the time! No one around here expects otherwise either.
oops….wrong thread. 🙂
The Retraction Watch article includes an extremely important sentence:
“We found the source of the error only after an investigation going back to the original copies of the data”.
It is important to *keep* raw data and to *provide* it to other researchers and critics.
A bit like the day Dana Nuttysilly wrote about Emma Thompson being wrong but in the right sort of way?
All I would say about such ‘studies’ is this: do they evaluate accurately what the values of the subjects are, based not on what they say but on how they act? I’ve met huge numbers of people whose claimed political ‘values’ or ‘beliefs’ are the exact opposite of how they actually behave in reality.
The classic behavioural trait is a psychotic personality stating that ‘you can do anything you want’ in abstract terms when decisions don’t have to be taken. Then, come decision time, they use every Machiavellian trick in the book to shoehorn the person into doing whatever it is that they want. Up to and including telling them exactly what it is that they are going to do.
Another classic one is saying you can hold whatever views you like, but using every form of emotional abuse in conversations whenever there is any suggestion that the person might not subscribe to their own beliefs. This says that the forces of coercion and control are strongly present and the only question is whether that is due to neurotic inadequacy demanding that their own views be confirmed by their family agreeing with them or whether they really are totalitarian psychopaths getting sexual frisson from subjugation and control.
Psychotic personality traits are measured behaviour.
Political values are things claimed by subjects.
The first is a scientific measurement, the second a stated opinion.
The way to measure true political values is to draw up a list of behavioural choices in certain situations and correlate different choices with true personality traits and true political values.
Here are a few examples:
1. If you believe in aspiration, you cannot believe in preventing others from furthering their careers in ways which have zero effect on your own career. If you do engage in that, you are a psychotic control freak seeking to crush and control.
2. If you believe in freedom of choice, whatsoever football club another person chooses to support has no effect on your life. If through freedom of choice, someone else causes you to take actions of coercive control, you do not believe in freedom of choice, you believe in totalitarian hierarchies.
3. If you take the Hippocratic oath, you have to make fundamental choices between pursuing the mind-controlling goals of the security services and practicing medicine according to humane principles. You cannot be a true doctor if you are a psychopath working for MI6.
4. If you believe in democratic accountability, you cannot support an EU which actively destroys the link between elected representatives in the European Parliament and the law-making authority which should result from such democratic elections. If you believe that only unelected officials can propose and draft legislation, you do not believe in democracy, you believe in oligarchy or tyranny.
5. If you believe in sporting competition, you cannot demand guaranteed entry into tournaments reserved for those having achieved the necessary qualifying standard. If you believe in the latter, you believe in closed shop cartels, not sporting excellence.
The most common trait in modern business is spouting one set of values whilst ruthlessly behaving in the opposite manner behind the scenes. The reason for that is quite clear: society has stated that it sanctions the behind-the-scenes behaviour as unacceptable rubbish not consistent with a modelling role in senior levels of society.
As a result, no study is ‘scientific’ if ti correlates opinions with scientifically measured reality.
Go and measure the true behaviour patterns of senior people of all political persuasions: you will be horrified by the conclusions you will draw.
The most likely one is that there are psychopaths in both liberal and conservative camps, since liberal and conservative camps are merely routes to power dependent not on true behaviour but on the perceptions of electors not granted sufficient facts to discern the difference between truth and dissembling publicity.
What does matter us that science is being ruined by corrupt scientists. And that nearly all scientists are left leaning.
Where have you heard that nearly all scientists are left leaning.
I will concede that may be the case in many of the social sciences, since these, for the most part, are not real scientists anyway.
As for the hard sciences, I’ve met scientists from all corners of the political spectrum.
Psychotic refers to schizophrenia, it is not related to Psychopathy.
I haven’t heard of Psychoticism, so I looked it up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychoticism
It’s an old personality theory (1950), the Big Five personality traits are modern.They need to teach that activism and science don’t mix in their ethics course.
Eric
This is my favorite quote from the retraction watch piece-
“Brad Verhulst, a researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University and a co-author on all four papers, said that it’s unclear whether the error originated from the authors, or the group that conducted the surveys:
‘I don’t know where it happened, all I know is it happened. It’s our fault for not figuring it out before.'”
Muhahahahahahahahaha! It’s not OUR fault we published a completely mistaken paper! People who publish papers don’t have to figure out whether or not things are correct or not, before they publish! I just put my name on them…I don’t actually CHECK to make sure they are correct.
D’0h!
Sorry…hit enter too soon. Meant to add-“Cook et al 2013 could learn something” before the Muhahahahahaha part.
FYI, I don’t believe many people read past the “Muhahahahahaha part”.
It could just be me ??
So he’s admitting that they didn’t bother to double check their work before publishing?
@MarkW,
Yes, that is what he admitted to doing. That said, one of the things that bugs me the most is that very few seem to ask themselves if they’re asking the wrong question and even fewer seem to want to do an error analysis and propagation as thoroughly as possible.