Religion items posed a risk of swamping the RWA scale
Evidence
I also stifled myself when I discovered how seductively easy it was to write items about religion. They could easily have swamped the scale, and I did not want an instrument that mainly measured authoritarianism in religious contexts. Instead, I tried to make the scale better at detecting sentiments like “Let’s all submit to the man-on-horseback” and “‘Let’s stomp out the rot,” because these aspects of authoritarianism worry me most. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 661
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- CANDY: The image of the researcher deliberately stifling himself because religion items were so seductively easy to write is a neat, shareable anecdote about scale construction.
- QUESTION: Why are authoritarianism items about religion so easy to write and why do they cluster so strongly? Is this a measurement artifact or a real signal about where authoritarian sentiment lives?
Related
- Religious authoritarianism items can swamp measures of general authoritarianism (similarity 0.89)
- RWA scale items do not depend on religious content to predict religiosity (similarity 0.88)
- Correlated scales can reveal tautological overlap rather than real psychological connections. (similarity 0.83)
- The RWA Scale measures one underlying authoritarian dimension, not separate traits (similarity 0.81)
- Validated religious scales fall out easily from high interitem correlations (similarity 0.81)
- Many religious people score low on authoritarianism and are non-fundamentalist (similarity 0.80)
- Religious commitment measured intrinsically does not prevent authoritarianism (similarity 0.80)
- Authoritarians adhere to traditional religious teachings across all religions sampled. (similarity 0.79)
- A small research literature can be an advantage for a psychological measure (similarity 0.79)
- The RWA scale correlates with liberal-conservative outlooks yet hides its purpose (similarity 0.78)