A single-page study with no reliability data was treated as validating the D Scale.

Evidence

Plant gave the Berkeley Fascism and Ethnocentrism Scales, along with the D Scale (so, the D, E, and F Scales) to 2,350 first-year students at San Jose State College. He did not present any reliability data on these tests; indeed, the entire report takes up but one page. But he did find, as Rokeach had found in English samples, that the F Scale correlated a little higher with Ethnocentrism (about .68) than the D Scale did (about .59). This result supposedly showed that the D Scale was a better measure of general authoritarianism. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2578

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to how weak instruments in social science (like the Lex Oppia-era reasoning in ‘Complaints About Immodesty’) get cited as authoritative despite thin evidence.