“Authoritarianism” and Agreement with Things Authoritative

Response Styles as Personality Variables: A Theoretical Integration of Multivariate Research1

“…The methodological critics of the Authoritarian Personality took particular exception to the California F scale because the authoritarian response was always keyed "true," thus confounding authoritarianism and acquiescence (Bess, 1955;Chapman & Campbell, 1957Christie, Havel, & Seidenberg, 1958;Peabody, 1961;Shelley, 1956;Small &~mpbell, 1960). Criticisms of this sort were brushed aside with the assertion that acquiescence is itself an authoritarian trait and tha.t the operation of this response style, far from reducing the validity of the F scale, actually enhanced it (Gage & Chatterjee, 1960; ; Leavitt, Hax, & Roche, 1955).…”

The Measurement of Authoritarian Attitudes

“…In constructing this reversed F scale, an attempt was made to rewrite each item so that the content would appear to reflect a viewpoint opposed to the original while retaining a similar style of expression. The correlations between agreement to original items and to various reversed forms were not found to be high and negative as would be expected from consistent responses to item content (2,22) and were sometimes found to be significantly positive ( 18,19).…”

“…Leavitt, Hax, and Roche (22) have indicated that the acquiescent response set in the F scale operates in the appropriate direction to increase the discriminatory power of the scale. Indeed, acquiescent tendencies are consistent with the personality theory underlying the F scale since the term &dquo;authoritarian submission&dquo; was one of those used to describe the authoritarian syndrome.…”

“…The recent investigations of Bass (2,28), Jackson ( 17), Jackson and Messick ( 18), and others ( 19,22) have emphasized the hazards of such a unidirectional item form in using the F scale as a measure of attitude. These studies assessed the relationships between F scale items in their original positively-stated form and F scale items rewritten in various &dquo;reversed&dquo; forms, so that disagreement rather than agreement could be considered an indication of authoritarian attitudes.…”

The Measurement of Individual Differences in Perceived Personality Trait Relationships and Their Relation to Certain Determinants

“…Testing 216 subjects, Becker (1961) reports the following full scale reliability estimates for the factors: items from the California F scale that are expressed in a negative form (i.e., disagreement with these items indicates strong authoritarian attitudes). The inclusion of these items was involved in recent evidence based upon correlations of reversed and unreversed forms of the California F scale that indicates that the F scale tends to elicit a response set to acquiesce which has a cumulative effect upon the scores (Bass, 1955;Chapman & Campbell, 1957;Jackson, Messick, & Soller, 1957a;Leavitt, Hax & Roche, 1955;Shelly, 1956;Zuckerman & Norton, 1958. Appendix K indicates the item number of particular items in the reversed scale and the item number of the corresponding unreversed item in the Public Opinion Questionnaire.…”