The American Journal of Political Science issued a correction to a 2012 study that contained “an error.” And what was this error? Well, to put it succinctly, the Journal reversed its conclusion that politically conservative individuals exhibited traits most associated with “psychoticism,” whereas those of a liberal bent did not. The Journal explained, “The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. 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.”

That’s one heck of an “oops.”

The Journal insists that the correction matters little to the paper’s overall conclusion and downplays the new results, stating, “Personality traits do not cause people to develop political attitudes.” But professor Steven Ludeke of the University of Southern Denmark argues that the error “matters quite a lot.” Ludeke says, “The erroneous results represented some of the larger correlations between personality and politics ever reported; they were reported and interpreted, repeatedly, in the wrong direction.” We’ll go out on a limb and predict that the correction gets swept under the rug or ignored entirely by the mainstream media.

Our own Mark Alexander has long argued that, politically speaking, the true pathology resides on the Left. As Alexander explained in 2007, “Generally, liberals tend to be mentally rigid and closed-minded because they are insecure, the result of low self-esteem and arrested emotional development associated, predominantly, with fatherless households or critically dysfunctional families in which they were not adequately affirmed. They exhibit fear, anger, and aggression — the behavioral consequences of arrested emotional development associated with childhood trauma (primarily rejection by a significant family member of origin as noted above). They display pessimism, disgust, and contempt for those who are self-sufficient for much the same reason. They believe that conforming to a code of non-conformity is a sign of individualism, when it is nothing more than an extreme form of conformism for those who are truly insecure.”

Long story short, a lot of liberals are kind of crazy.