Religious authoritarianism items can swamp measures of general authoritarianism

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

• SEED: The ease of writing religion items that swamp a general construct connects to a measurement-warning essay about construct creep in survey design.