Psychology experts who have been drawn into the Democrats’ call for President Trump to be removed from office because he is mentally unfit have had their collective hand slapped in a new study that reveals professionals’ own political orientation biases their perceptions, despite claims to objectivity.
The study, “Personality profiles of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: Fooled by your own politics,” was authored by Joshua D. Wright and Monica F. Tomlinson and reported by PsyPost.
“As part of a larger study that we conducted pre- and post-2016 election on predicting voting for Donald Trump, we had participants report the personalities of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton post-election as an exploratory look at how voting might be linked to perceived personality traits of political candidates,” said Wright.
The 354 study participants provided information about whom they voted for, their personality rating of the two candidates and a self-rating of their own political ideology between extremely liberal and extremely conservative.
The candidates’ personalities were rated using the standard Big 5 measures of agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, openness to experience and extraversion.
The researchers then compared the perceptions of the study participants with other studies that captured personality perceptions by psychology experts. There was a major mismatch.
“In short, expert raters thought Hillary Clinton was highly emotionally stable and highly conscientious and yet it was conscientious and emotionally stable voters that preferred Donald Trump,” Wright noted.
“Experts … rated Donald Trump very low in conscientiousness and very low in emotional stability, which should have been off putting for conscientious and emotionally stable voters. Either the congruency model didn’t apply to this particular election or the experts … were wrong.”
Unsurprisingly, the researchers found their study participants biased in how they perceived the candidates, but what stood out was the bias of the experts, who either mirrored Clinton voters in their perception of Trump or offerred even more negative evaluations.
Additional analysis of other materials confirmed the experts in the compared studies held left-leaning political views, which, intentionally or not, had seeped into their professional evaluations.
“Experts are just as politically biased as everyone else. They cannot objectively rate the personalities of political candidates. When expert raters are highly skewed to the left, the personality profiles will be highly skewed to present the left-wing candidate in a more favorable light. Expert raters are basically Clinton voters in disguise,” Wright told PsyPost.
As WND reported, without ever having examined Trump, psychological professionals have called the president “psychotic,” “narcissistic,” “paranoid,” “hypomanic,” “emotionally unstable,” “delusional” and “psychologically isolated” and claimed he has a “dangerous mental illness.” One physician suggested Trump could be suffering from an untreated sexually transmitted disease known as neurosyphilis.
“Expert assessments go beyond personality assessment,” Wright said. “For example, Bandy Lee (a psychiatrist) uses her expert status to make claims that Donald Trump suffers from mental illness.
As WND reported, Bandy Lee, an assistant professor in forensic psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine and author of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump,” says she briefed Democrats and one Republican on Trump’s mental health status on Dec. 5 and 6 of last year. Lee and Harvard’s Judith Herman and Columbia’s Robert Jay Lifton released a statement warning that Trump is “further unraveling,” despite the fact that they’ve never actually examined the president.
Lee demanded an “emergency” evaluation and even restraint by force of the president, claiming failure to address Trump’s declining mental-health state could lead to “the extinction of the human species.”
Lee, it was reported, may not even have a license in her home state of Connecticut.
Following her calls for evaluation and restraint of Trump going public, Lee deleted her Twitter account.
As WND reported last July, it has long been considered unethical for psychiatrists to “diagnose” politicians or public figures based solely on that person’s public actions or statements, without conducting an actual in-person examination. But now that Trump is president, a national psychology organization, the American Psychoanalytic Association, has given psychoanalysts the green light to publicly comment on Trump’s mental health.
Since Lee’s statements were made public, the American Psychiatric Association released a statement urging psychiatrists to stop trying to evaluate Trump when they’ve never even examined him.
“We at the APA call for an end to psychiatrists providing professional opinions in the media about public figures whom they have not examined, whether it be on cable news appearances, books, or in social media,” the American Psychiatric Association’s statement said. “Arm-chair psychiatry or the use of psychiatry as a political tool is the misuse of psychiatry and is unacceptable and unethical.”
And, based on the new study by Wright and Tomlinson, such mental evaluations are little more than exercises in political confirmation bias.
