Acquiescence inflated but did not fully generate authoritarianism scale correlations

Evidence

In general summary, then, it seems to be certain that a tendency to acquiescence has been a factor in standard F Scale scores but not the major factor. Since acquiescence or Yeasaying is also a factor in many other personality inventories correlations between F Scale scores and other inventory scores may have been generated by acquiescence rather than authoritarianism. In the original Berkeley research the correlations demonstrating the generality of authoritarianism, the correlations among A-S, E, and F scores were probably somewhat elevated by the acquiescence set that was free to operate in all of them. It may be significant that the correlations of A-S, E, and F are somewhat lower with PEC (about .55) than with one another since the PEC scale was balanced with some items asserting conservative attitudes and some asserting liberal attitudes. It is equally certain that acquiescence is not a strong enough factor to have produced all of the correlation among A-S, E, and F and that significant evidence for the generality of authoritarianism remains intact. The results with interviews, TAT stories, and projective questions are exempt from the effects of response set, since with these methods one does not suggest an answer. The fact that the relations demonstrated in this work generally confirm the findings with questionnaires increases our confidence that the questionnaire findings were not entirely generated by response set. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 592

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies ‘acquiescence response set’ as a methodological artifact: agreeing with items regardless of content, which inflates correlations between unbalanced scales.
• XREF: connects to: Early-session acquiescence produced a positive bias in Adorno’s group data. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2036