All that matters is that p < 0.05:
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.
We’re not clear how much the corrections should inform our thinking about politics and personality traits, however, because it’s not clear from the paper how strongly those two are linked. The authors claim that the strength of the links are not important, as they do not affect the main conclusions of the papers — although some personality traits appear to correlate with political beliefs, one doesn’t cause the other, nor vice versa. …
In total, three papers have been corrected by authors, and a correction has been submitted on one more.
We’ll start with an erratum that explains the backstory of the error in detail. It appears on “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies,” published by the American Journal of Political Science …
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.
At this point I must admit that I need to correct a number of papers. I've just now realized that when I coded my scope variable (for the infamous scope test in CVM) as equal to 1 for more and 0 for less, this was exactly reversed. My bad! However, I don't really give a dang whether more is better … just the magnitude of the effect. But that doesn't matter either.
Huh?
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