Acquiescence skews balanced-scale answers toward agreement, not genuine endorsement

Evidence

Yet you often find more agreement than disagreement overall on balanced, valid psychological tests. On the RWA Scale, for example, with its long, complicated items, the breakdown is usually about 60-40. Moreover, if you give subjects a chance to correct earlier mistakes by having them reanswer the RWA Scale, compare their two sets of answers, and then decide what their final answer will be, they move about 10% of their responses from one side of the neutral point to the other-mostly from agreement to disagreement. These changes tend to occur on early items (especially the first contrait) and on longer items where confusion may have led to a yea-say (EOF, p. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 809

Categorization

• XREF: This is a methodological caution relevant to interpreting any survey-based RWA findings, including the Cooper and Whitehead & Perry material in the vault — yea-saying inflates apparent agreement on long items.