Authoritarianism measures correlate with punitive life experiences even across separate administrations
Evidence
These studies were performed with Manitoba students and reported in Altemeyer, 1988. On October 24, 1989, David Hansen administered the RWA Scale for me to 183 SUNY-Potsdam students. Sixteen days later I visited his campus and gave out the Experiences Scale to 143 of these same participants. The surveys were printed on different size and color paper and answered on different bubble sheets, and no connection was made between the two studies by either experimenter. Yet the scores on the two scales correlated .71. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 997
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- XREF: Cross-validates the methodology thread of Milgrom’s private-institution studies and the trust literature — measurement robustness across contexts.
Related
- Authoritarian attitudes correlate strongly with reported authoritarian experiences across sites (similarity 0.85)
- Authoritarianism can be traced to measurable environmental experiences (similarity 0.83)
- Authoritarianism shows weak or absent links to intelligence measures (similarity 0.80)
- Authoritarianism does not correlate with academic grades or general intelligence (similarity 0.80)
- Authoritarianism test scores are only moderately stable across eighteen years (similarity 0.79)
- RWA and LWA scores correlate positively across both student and parent samples (similarity 0.79)
- Authoritarianism correlates with all six distinct components of conservatism (similarity 0.79)
- Authoritarians show elevated hostility toward women and acceptance of rape myths (similarity 0.78)