Amidst the recent brouhaha about the alleged sexism of discussing Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s perceived “unlikability” and relative unpopularity as a presidential candidate, Atlantic columnist Peter Beinart asserted that any conversation on this issue should take account of America’s entrenched misogyny — especially hostility toward female ambition. As evidence, he pointed to a 2010 study with seemingly striking results:

[T]wo Yale professors, Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto, showed identical fictional biographies of two state senators — one male and one female — to participants. … When they added quotations to the biographies that characterized each as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” the male state senator grew more popular. But the female state senator not only lost support among both women and men, but also provoked “moral outrage.”

As Beinart notes, he has written about this study several times before, mostly in the context of arguing that hostility toward Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi is rooted in sexism: a female politician seen as ambitious or power-seeking elicits not only negativity but “contempt, anger, and disgust” (feelings that the study groups under “moral outrage”). The issue is clearly important to him, and he clearly finds the Brescoll/Okimoto study compelling. Others, including current New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg during her time at Slate, have also cited it as a stark demonstration of fear and loathing of powerful women.

Guess what: the study actually shows nothing of the kind. Also, it’s a pretty bad study, and the people who peddle it should feel bad — especially since they generally link to various summaries rather than the study itself, of which a free digital copy is available online.

In the internet-based study, 230 Americans 18 to 76 years old (two-thirds of them women) read a short biography of a fictional Oregon state senator, identified as “John Burr” or “Ann Burr.” They then rated Ann/John on a 7-point scale on various qualities of “agency” (strong, assertive, tough), “communality” (caring, supportive) and “competence” (competent, productive, effective). The questionnaire also asked participants to rate how much they would like Burr to be their representative and to what extent they felt various emotions toward him/her (including contempt, anger, irritation, disgust, etc.). Half of the participants got a version of the text with this added paragraph:

The Oregon Sun-Sentinel described him/her as “one of the most ambitious politicians in Oregon … a politician that has always had a strong will to power.” Burr him/herself has been quoted as saying that “Being hungry is everything … it’s key to gaining influence in politics.”

And here is the table summarizing the results:

Yes, it’s true when a female politician is described as power-seeking, her ratings become somewhat more negative while those of a male politician become somewhat more positive. But the summaries and the media reports omit some key information.

When the politician is not explicitly described as power-seeking and ambitious, Ann is perceived more favorably than John, with much higher ratings on some items. She also comes out ahead in voter preference. (This finding echoes other recent research showing that voters of both parties tend to be biased in favor of female politicians.)

And the “moral outrage” part? With no ambition/power-seeking cues, the mean moral outrage rating for John was .27 points higher than for Ann. Among participants who got the text with the power-seeking cues, the mean moral outrage rating was .17 points higher for Ann than for John.

However, the claim that participants reacted with “moral outrage” to the power-seeking female politician but not to the power-seeking male is simply wrong. (Disturbingly, the misconception was promoted by the study authors themselves in a brief write-up on the website of the Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard.) In fact, the moral outrage ratings for both were extremely low: midway between 1 and 2 on a 7-point scale, i.e., between “none” and “very little.” The man fared marginally better than the woman with the “power-seeking/ambition” cue; the woman fared marginally better without it.

Do these findings indicate lingering negativity toward open ambition in women? Maybe. But several caveats are in order. One, the study has not been replicated; knowing what we know about the “replication crisis” in the social sciences, drawing sweeping and far-reaching conclusions from a single study is foolhardy at best. To take a related example: There has been a lot of hype about a 2003 experiment in which business school students regarded a male entrepreneur as more likable and a better colleague than his female twin with an otherwise identical resume (the “Heidi/Howard study”). The fact that the experiment was repeated 10 years later and this time the woman was rated as more likable and as a preferable colleague has gotten a lot less exposure.

Second, the somewhat negative reactions to “Ann Burr” happened when the text had a passage explicitly stressing her ambition and power-seeking (with a quote from the politician herself about being “hungry”). Without those cues, the study found, the female politician was not perceived as more ambitious or power-hungry than her male counterpart. In real life, messages about a politician’s ambition and power-seeking are far more complex than in the study’s fictional vignette, with a lot of variables the study didn’t explore. (For instance: is the negative effect of such messages neutralized by stressing that the politician is caring and ethical, two areas in which women in politics have an edge in popular perception?)

In short: The John Burr/Ann Burr study tells us zilch about prejudice against ambitious female politicians, and people would do well to stop using it.

Are female politicians held back by gender biases? That’s a complicated topic. (There’s evidence that, for the most part, being female is now an advantage in politics — or at least it was 10 years ago.) But, ironically, misogyny in politics can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: some Massachusetts voters have told The Boston Globe they don’t want Warren to run because “there are still some people out there who won’t vote for a woman.”

So next time you want to hype a study supposedly showing that Americans find female ambition in politics repulsive, think again. And check your data.