Coulter’s neutral group was so unusually equalitarian it distorted the comparison

Evidence

As Christie (1956a) has pointed out, Coulter’s “neutral” soldiers were an extraordinarily equalitarian group. Their mean F Scale score is the lowest-but-one of the fifty or so group means known to Christie. It is well below the usual level of American college students and also well below some means obtained by Rokeach (1960) for samples of English college students. It looks as if Coulter’s Communists are more authoritarian than the “neutrals” only because the neutrals are very exceptionally nonauthoritarian. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 665

Categorization

• XREF: A clean example of a selection-bias artifact explaining away an apparent left-authoritarian finding — parallels baseline distortion problems in other comparison studies.