Response acquiescence can fabricate correlations between unrelated survey scales

Evidence

Furthermore, researchers noted long ago that unbalanced scales usually correlate best with other unbalanced scales (Hyman and Sheatsley, 1954; Campbell, Siegman, and Rees, 1967)—or indeed with anything potentially affected by yea-saying, including single-item questions. Shared acquiescence could thus create a connection between any two things, no matter what they (supposedly) measure. — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 775

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to assessing the vault’s correlational evidence linking authoritarianism measures to prejudice and nationalism measures. — connects to: Treating Likert responses as interval data distorts estimates when aggregating across disparate items — Ruiqian Li and Paul Froese, The Duality of American Christian…, 96
• ADDENDUM: Supports methodological caution when evaluating aggregate survey-claim books like those of Whitehead & Perry, where scales are correlated without item-direction analysis.