In 2010, a paper titled "The nature of the relationship between personality traits and political attitudes" claimed to find a strong positive correlation between conservatism and psychoticism.
[1][2] In 2010, Brad Verhulst, Peter K. Hatemi, and Nicholas G. Martin published a paper in Personality and Individual Differences arguing for the "third factor" explanation.
[2] Verhulst and Hatemi made the same mistake in a 2012 American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) publication that used a different set of data.
[6] In 2012, Steven G. Ludeke, a Ph.D. psychology student, spotted that the direction of the claimed correlation in the 2010 and 2012 papers contradicted both prior research and common sense; a positive correlation would mean that compared to liberals, conservatives are more drug-friendly, care less about cleanliness, and disdain society’s strictures.
According to Ludeke and DeYoung, this triggered Hatemi and Verhulst to "race" to submit corrections to all the journals that published the error.
Hatemi and Verhulst published a response, titled "Correcting Honest Errors Versus Incorrectly Portraying Them: Responding to Ludeke and Rasmussen", in the same journal.