Autocorrelated errors explain the apparent relationship between disapproval of the US Congress and prosocial language

Abstract

Recently, it has been claimed by Frimer et al. (2015) that there is a linear relationship between the level of prosocial language and the level of public disapproval of US Congress. A re-analysis demonstrates that this relationship is the result of a misspecified model that does not account for first-order autocorrelated disturbances. A Stata script to reproduce all presented results is available as an appendix.

arXiv comment6 pages, 1 figure