The F scale collapsed once item acquiescence was statistically controlled

Evidence

Adorno et al.’s great contribution was their famous F scale to measure the authoritarian personality and their extensive research showing that it correlated powerfully with anti-Semitism, generalized prejudice against minorities, chauvinistic nationalism, politico-economic conservatism, and right-wing extremism. Despite enormous initial interest, however, interest in this perspective and the F scale largely collapsed by the late 1960s. First, the psychodynamic processes (repressed and displaced aggression) on which the theory was built received little empirical support. Second, and perhaps most critically, the F scale was shown to be a psychometrically weak measure. When acquiescence due to the uniformly positive formulation of its items was controlled the F scale was neither adequately reliable nor unidimensional (Altemeyer, 1981). — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 2441

Categorization

• XREF: Directly corroborates and grounds the vault’s existing claim that the authoritarian-personality tradition’s psychometric foundations are weak.