High reliability coefficients can be manufactured by item count regardless of construct coherence

Evidence

The only reason the Dogmatism Scale achieves reliabilities around .80, even with response sets producing some artificial internal consistency, is because it has so many items. You can produce “acceptable reliability” among a set of barely connecting statements that measure gobs of different things if you simply assemble enough of them. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 4244

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains why Cronbach-style reliability numbers are not sufficient evidence a scale is unidimensional.
• XREF: Connects to measurement critique that runs through Altemeyer’s RWA work and generally relevant to any scale-design discussion.