Acquiescence and disagreement are stable personality traits, not just measurement errors

Evidence

Behavior that is consistent for one person over a range of situations and also different from one person to another is a personality characteristic. Response sets to agree or disagree first appeared as sources of error in personality inventories but we have come to realize that they are also personality characteristics in their own right; they may be characteristics of greater interest than most of those that the inventories were designed to measure. In 1960, Couch and Keniston gave names to the two personality types involved—“Yeasayers” and “Naysayers.” — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 589 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Couch and Keniston made a powerful demonstration of the existence of the two kinds of response set. They administered hundreds of items from a large and diversified collection of inventories and assigned each subject an “Over-all Agreement Score” (OAS). Subjects with a high OAS are the Yeasayers and subjects with a low OAS are the Naysayers. Yeasaying and Naysaying were demonstrated to be relatively stable and generalized traits by showing that subjects with a high OAS continued to agree with items from new tests of various kinds and subjects with low OAS continued to disagree. Clinical studies of extreme scorers on the OAS suggested that Yeasayers are individuals with weak ego controls who accept impulses without reservation whereas Naysayers are individuals who control and suppress impulses. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 590 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Response acquiescence distorts psychological test scores undetected; Agreement and disagreement biases are personality traits, not just measurement errors — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 589; Correlations between unbalanced personality scales were inflated by shared acquiescence set (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Agreement and disagreement biases are personality traits, not just measurement errors #corroborates (1.00) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 589
• Yeasaying and naysaying are stable generalized traits tied to impulse control #expands (0.93) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 590