Our colleague Sarah Chaffee this morning notes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof’s unthinking dismissal of evolution skeptics as “nincompoops.” Well, we’ve been called worse things than that.

The discourse of name-calling is a scourge of public life today, and it’s only getting worse, seen across a broad spectrum of political and scientific perspectives, with college students even more severely infected than their elders. I’m referring to the strategy of jeering at your opponents as “racist,” “sexist,” “denier,” “anti-science,” “creationist,” you name it, as a substitute for addressing them on the substance of what they say.

For the dedicated name-callers it’s of course a plus if you can silence people you don’t like by invoking a seemingly objective authority — science. For example: Science says that as a political conservative, you’re prone to “authoritarianism” and “psychoticism.”

That was the takeaway from a widely referenced article by a trio of social scientists writing in the American Journal of Political Science. Now, though, I see from Steven Hayward at Powerline, citing the invaluable Retraction Watch, that the authors have been forced to concede that they had their results backward (“Epic Correction of the Decade“).

And I mean precisely backward. This is kind of stunning:

This is the journal that published a finding much beloved of liberals a few years back that purported to find scientific evidence that conservatives are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness, and that the supposed “authoritarian” personality of conservatives might even have a genetic basis (and therefore be treatable someday?). Settle in with a cup or glass of your favorite beverage, and get ready to enjoy one of the most epic academic face plants ever.

The original article was called “Correlation not causation: the relationship between personality traits and political ideologies,” and was written by three academics at Virginia Commonwealth University.

In a nutshell, the authors found:

In line with our expectations, P [for “Psychoticism”] (positively related to tough-mindedness and authoritarianism) is associated with social conservatism and conservative military attitudes.

Now the Erratum, which begins:

The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34-51. 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.

Hayward:

If you go back to the excerpts above and swap out the ideological categories you will have to suppress a horselaugh. Liberals are more prone to “psychoticism” (which the authors hasten to explain doesn’t meant “psychotic,” but what the hell. . .), and hence authoritarianism, which would come as no surprise to any conservative who pays attention to authoritarian liberalism.

Returning to the subject of evolution, this should remind us that scientists, social or otherwise, are prone just like everybody else to see what they want to see, and to label their preferred conclusions as objective and scientific. The social and natural sciences are different bodies of scholarship with different traditions and protocols, but following Retraction Watch also reminds you how prone they both are to shocking failures and fabrications. Just scan the most recent headlines and you’ll see.

This is one reason why thoughtful people outside of science need to be so careful to do their homework and think for themselves rather than obediently accepting the directive to believe what’s expected, and label everyone else with nasty epithets, because Science Says.

This epic Erratum couldn’t come at a better time. Calling names, even backed by “science,” is no substitute for addressing arguments. I don’t, of course, expect that to be widely recognized anytime soon.

Photo credit: Crosa [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.