Politics and Personality: Most of What You Read Is Malarkey

Maria Konnikova · 23 Aug 2016

The piece opens with

Correlations found between openness and liberalism are largely tautological, because political leanings were built into the personality measures.

Their wordsSo what happens when we look for correlations between, say, openness and liberalism? We find one because it’s largely tautological.

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Correlations found between openness and liberalism are largely tautological, because political leanings were built into the personality measures.

Their wordsSo what happens when we look for correlations between, say, openness and liberalism? We find one because it’s largely tautological.
Our reading
People readily accept counterintuitive findings from social psychology as long as they do not conflict with their notions of what ought to be.

Their wordsSocial psychology touches on our most cherished beliefs about how the world should operate. We are more than happy to accept the counterintuitive—as long as it doesn’t conflict with our central notions of what ought to be.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.