Monday, February 13, 2017

The Science is Settled: Liberal=>Psychotic=>Less Intelligent

       I was this the other day: "Science says liberals, not conservatives, are psychotic"--New York Post. (See also here). From the NY Post article:
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.” 
In the paper, psychoticism is associated with traits such as tough-mindedness [rigid-mindedness?], risk-taking, sensation-seeking, impulsivity and authoritarianism.
Which reminded me of this from last month: "Pop Culture Was Wrong - Psychopaths Are More Likely to Have Below-Average Intelligence"--Science-Alert. The article reports that "[b]ased on a meta-analysis of 187 previous studies, researchers have found that psychopaths actually have lower than average intellect[.]" And, once again: "The traits most often associated with psychopathy are callousness, remorselessness, lack of empathy, grandiosity, impulsivity, deceitfulness, and manipulativeness."

In other words: liberals tend to be psychotic; psychotics are less intelligent; thus liberals must tend to be less intelligent. QED

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