Two days ago I came across this article in Science Codex.

Extremist sympathies more likely in white British and UK-born people

which took me to the paper itself:

Extremism and common mental illness: cross-sectional community survey of White British and Pakistani men and women living in England | The British Journal of Psychiatry

which is Open Access and can be viewed in HTML, downloaded as a PDF, and other options.

However, I have a strong misgiving. In the sort of psychological questionnaires used in this study, is there not always a danger that the questions may mean something different to one group than the other?

In the Discussion section, we find

Surprisingly, extremist sympathies were more prevalent in White British than in Pakistani people.

Now since I am not a fan of what G.K.Chesterton called “sham science concerning races”, I too am somewhat surprised.

However, what raised my hackles was the end of the Science Codex article, a section beginning

Dr Clive Gabay, Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, . . .

I suspect senior lecturers in international politics are something of a self-selecting group, and cannot be expected to give an unbiassed comment on the results of research such as this.

What do readers think?