An old post has suddenly received a lot of traffic, and anger.  So a clarification.

After the last post, I thought, "perhaps I was too broad.  Maybe too political, maybe I didn't have enough concrete examples."

Then I opened my mail.

Starring Megan Fox.

Oh, The Last Psychiatrist wrote another conspiracy article.  That must mean it's wrong.  So I don't have to deal with it.  Phew.  Pass me the Blue Pill, I'm feeling anxious again, for no reason at all.

Yes, but not that one.

The most important question about any scientific study, that must be answered before any others are asked:

What do they want to be true?

What, you think they go back and fix them?

And what you think I'm going to say next reveals your educational and political biases.

(From The New Yorker)


You mean I get to pick?

I.

A news story, talked about ad nauseam, concerning a study in Science that no one will bother to read.

Subjects-- liberals and conservatives-- are shown random pictures of scary stuff (spider on a person's face) interspersed between photos of neutral stuff (bunnies.)   Conservatives exhibit much more fear (e.g. startle response, skin response) than liberals.

In case the political implications of this study are not obvious, these are the titles of the news reports about the study: 

• Science News: The Politics of Fear 
• Slate: Republicans Are From Mars, Liberals Are From Venus
  
• Scientific American:  Are you more likely to be politically left or right if you scare easily? 
• Freakonomics blog: Don't scream, you'll give your ideals away

Etc. The message is clear: conservatives get scared more easily than liberals.

Right?  That's what the titles say--  I'm not off base here, right?  There's no other possible way to interpret them?

II. 

The methodology is fine-- but the interpretation is so demonstrably flawed that they are actually interpreting the results backwards.

Here's the most important line of all-- found only in the SA article-- in the second to last paragraph, of course:

People who leaned more politically left didn't respond any differently to those [scary]  images than they did to pictures of a bowl of fruit, a rabbit or a happy child.

Really?  Spider on face vs. happy child?  No difference?

That extra bit of info doesn't even appear in the Science News story-- or anywhere else, for that matter.




The graph shows that liberals and conservatives have a trivial skin response to neutral pictures, and liberals show no difference in response when confronted with a scary photo.

So the actual finding isn't that conservatives are fearful; it's that liberals seem not to exhibit much response to scary photos.

III.

But it's actually a little worse than that.

The typical use for such tests of startle and fear aren't to see how scared people are, they are used specifically to find out how scared people aren't.  For example, they are used to evaluate psychopathy, and the results are the same as here-- psychopaths have decreased responses, compared to normal people, to aversive photos.

So which is it?  Are conservatives fearful, or are liberals psychopaths?

I'm not picking sides in the debate, but I am pointing out how this study missed the actual result-- liberals are less fearful than would be expected-- and then the study was publicized in the media with an entirely backwards inference, that conservatives scare easily.

But it sounds like science, conducted by scientists; it's published in Science, and then publicized in Scientific American.  It must be true.

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