Jordan Peterson on psychology: what the evidence says · JRE #877
SUBJECT: PSYCHOLOGY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
our research indicated, research on political correctness indicated that this trait agreeableness is a good predictor of holding politically correct views, and also that being female is a good predictor of holding politically correct views.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Peterson is referring to research he supervised with graduate student Christine Andary-Brophy (formerly Christine Brophy) at the University of Toronto, which developed a political correctness (PC) scale administered to several hundred participants alongside personality, intelligence, and disgust-sensitivity measures. That research, summarized in Andary-Brophy's MA thesis, found that trait Agreeableness (particularly its Compassion facet) was the strongest and most consistent personality predictor of PC attitudes; a 2020 peer-reviewed PLOS ONE study independently cites this Agreeableness finding when building on it. The claim about being female is less rigorously supported: Scientific American's coverage of the Brophy/Peterson study reports that PC endorsers 'tended to be female, non-White, and report higher levels of compassion,' but this reflects a descriptive pattern in the sample rather than a formal regression establishing sex as an independent predictor on par with Agreeableness. No peer-reviewed publication from this research program was found reporting sex as a rigorously tested, independent PC predictor. Overall, the agreeableness-PC link is well supported by the primary research and corroborated elsewhere; the female-as-predictor claim is directionally consistent with reported patterns in the same study but overstates the analytical rigor behind it.