Conservatives Can Relax: A(n Ethical) Reanalysis of “Bad News” by Cordelia Fine has been published in the most recent issue of Neuroethics:
Abstract
A recent article in Neuroethics posited
“bad news for conservatives,” on the basis of survey data collected on
line. On the basis of bivariate correlations between self-reported
conservatism/liberalism and a variety of moral propositions, the author
inferred that those moral judgments were ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’
Then, based on a series of bivariate correlations between those same
moral propositions and measures of “morally worrisome” personality
characteristics, the author concluded that conservatives tended to have
these morally worrisome characteristics. Unfortunately, the original
article was replete with methodological and statistical errors. This
paper presents a reanalysis of the data from the original article, using
good statistical and methodological technique. The reanalysis suggests
that there are some small but potentially theoretically meaningful
relationships between some moral propositions and three morally
worrisome (antisocial) personality characteristics. The data also
suggest that these relationships can change substantially depending on
other conditions, so should not yet be generalized.
Comments