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The article reports on a study on the effect of a special program on the level of authoritarianism of subjects with high scores on the California F scale. The subjects were graduate students of education, mostly from developing countries. The design called for measuring gain in two equivalent groups one of which received a specially constructed counter-authoritarian treatment while the other was used as a control group. The method of pooling variances was used for data processing, and the results showed a significant reduction in post-test F scores in the experimental group. The first part of the study is concerned with identifying specific aspects of authoritarianism on the basis of which a counter- authoritarian treatment is developed. The second part is concerned with measuring the effect of this treatment and examining implications for teacher training programs in authoritarian settings. Although this study is concerned with authoritarianism in a Middle Eastern cultural setting, it has relevance to more than its geographic locus. Authoritarianism tends to rise periodically, at least among segments of the population, in Europe and the U.S.

Adorno et al.'s F Scale is a widely used test in psychological research. To date, most if not all of the validity experiments on the F Scale have been based on attitudes and not behavior. The present experiment was designed to test three of the nine F subscales on the basis of a behavioral criterion. The experiment was carried out in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The results indicate that three F subscales may not be measuring the authoritarian-submissive trait. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review of acquiescence response set in the California F scale. The article states that acquiescence response set does not seem to be present to a degree sufficient to seriously damage the validity of the scale. In using the F scale, original type items should be used, for unless the neutral points of reversed items are in some way taken into account, the validity of the scale is probably jeopardized when reversals are employed. The use of short forms of the F scale should be avoided. A short form greatly increases the chances that the total score will reflect specific item variances rather than common ones, thus seriously compromising the validity of the scale. The Authoritarian Personality was a significant contribution with many implications for major social problems. The F scale, as the operationalization of the main concept of this work, has been neglected because of widespread doubts concerning its validity. If based upon a fear of acquiescence response set, such doubts appear to be unjustified.

The California F Scale was found to correlate positively with a paper-and-pencil measure of propensity to expect people to be thoroughly good or thoroughly bad. As a further explanation of this relationship, Ss in a laboratory situation were given mildly derogatory information about one respected partner and nonderogatory information about another respected partner. Ss who had scored high on the F Scale resisted the mildly derogatory information and continued to rate their 2 partners about equally favorably. Low F Ss lowered their evaluations of the partner about whom mildly derogatory information had been received and gave their 2 partners final ratings which were more unequally favorable than those given by high scorers. Low F Ss also conformed more unequally to the judgments expressed by the 2 partners than did high scorers. These experimental findings are interpreted to reflect the greater reluctance of high scorers to believe that "good people" possess a mixture of good and bad attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers an experimental study examining several causes of trusting behavior, and its relation to the F scale. The section presents informations concerning the relationship between choices in the two positions, trusting or suspicious. It also shows a significant relationship between the subject's game behavior and his score on the F scale. The F scale scores correlated significantly with game behavior; subjects with low scores tended to be trusting and trustworthy while subjects with high scores tended to be suspicious and untrustworthy in their game choices.

The responses of 704 college freshmen to the 29 item F scale were factor analyzed. The analysis of primary concern utilized computer programs for both extraction and rotation; graphic rotations of factors taken from odd-and even-numbered sub-samples were used to estimate the reliability of the individual factors. While a nearly general factor emerged, the total factor structure clearly indicates that the F scale is multidimensional. This finding is interpreted as support for the contention that the F scale total score must necessarily obscure relationships which hold for subsets of items. Six reasonably stable group factors emerged, one of which was merged with the general. The six factors were named Conventionalism, Cynicism, Aggression, Projectivity, Superstition and Stereotypy, and Good Versus Bad People. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relation of the F-scale to response set to answer positively. A measure of response set to answer positively was constructed by item analyzing the Minnesota Multiphasic Inventory, which is composed of 566 relatively ambiguous items. However, instead of scoring in terms of the conventional method the total number of "true" responses was calculated. No apparent meaning for such a score could be discovered in the literature. The MMPI was scored in this manner for 133 students at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The resulting scores correlated .25 with the F scale (significant at the 1 per cent level). Since previous research had indicated that the F scale tended to correlate significantly with indices of intelligence (2), it was necessary to check the possibility that the total number of items answered true on the MMPI was not serving simply as an additional measure of intelligence. When the "total number of trues" score on the MMPI was related to the Altus Verbal Aptitude Scale, the correlation was .08, which was not significant. In order to shorten the response set measure an item analysis of the MMPI was carried out.

This article reports two studies on authoritarianism. Data were gathered from samples of New York City and Ohio State University students. The California Fascism (F) scale, measures of political ideology, and measures of general authoritarianism (GA) were administered. The following conclusions were drawn: (1) The concept of a general authoritarian syndrome is supported; (2) The F scale must be considered to be primarily a measure of rightist authoritarianism; (3) There is a positive correlation between GA and conservatism; (4) Authoritarians differ in the content of their opinion and censoring tendencies; (5) There is no relationship between GA and extremity of political ideology; (6) There is no connection between GA and the politically active versus passive dichotomy.

The California F Scale and the EPPS were administered to 118 male and 79 female college students. F Scale scores were positively correlated with the EPPS Scales of Order and Abasement, and negatively correlated with the Autonomy, Intraception, and Heterosexuality Scales of the EPPS. For males, the EPPS Dominance Scale was positively related to the F Scale; males differed significantly from females in this respect. The results were highly consistent with theoretical assumptions involved in the concept of authoritarianism and tended to support both the validity of the concept and the validity of the F Scale as a measure of authoritarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the relationship between authoritarianism as a dimension and the use of information for making accurate social judgments. Two outcomes seemed possible. One was that the greater the degree of authoritarianism, the greater the inaccuracy of judgments based on information presented. This hypothesis is predicated on the assumption that authoritarianism, as operationalized through the California F Scale, bears a linear relationship to its correlates. The other was that the correlation between authoritarianism and accuracy of judgments of others is curvilinear. Comparisons between mean estimated California F scores for the high role and the low role were made. The results indicated that within the total subject group as well as within each of the subgroups, the high-role respondent was rated higher in California F than the respondent on the low-role recording. Clearly, the information presented differentiated between the two roles. However, the degree of differentiation varied with the degree of authoritarianism. The results, in general, confirm the hypothesis that the greater the degree of authoritarianism the greater the distortion of attitudinal judgments.

The article presents a comment on researcher K. Kelly's article on sexual liberation, old-fashioned outlook and authoritarianism. Systematic and extensive reviews of the evidence for and against the authoritarian personality theory of researchers T.W. Adorno, E. Frenkel-Brunswik, D.J. Levinson, and R.N. Sanford generally conclude that the evidence for the theory is very poor. Although high scorers on the Adorno F scale are sometimes found to behave in ways seen as submissive to authority, this is hardly surprising in view of the many admiring statements about authority made in the F scale. It is the less obvious aspects of the theory that constitute its interest, and evidence for other aspects of the theory is hard to find. Considering the amount of testing that the Adorno et al. theory has had, one might expect that the many failures to conform would be seen as fairly damning for the theory. In general, this is what has happened in the area of central concern for the Adorno et at theory, the theory is now hardly mentioned. There are reason; for everything however, and one reason why the Adorno et al. theory may still have adherents is that there are some things that it does seem to get right. In particular, no matter what one does to eliminate methodological problems, the F scale always does seem to predict racism.

Central to the California account of authoritarianism was the view that the authoritarian is chronically hostile towards others. In fact component "g" of the F scale is described as measuring "Generalized hostility." As a proposed explanation of the phenomena of German Nazism, authoritarianism to a very considerable extent consisted of an explanation of hostility. The California theory, however, has always been difficult to test because of the problems with their central measuring instrument--the F scale. Two of these problems are its openness to acquiescent response set and its lack of behavioral validity. These problems, however have now been substantially overcome by the emergence of a successful balanced version of the F scale and the emergence of a new scale of authoritarian personality (the "Directiveness" scale) that does predict behavior. The present study retests the California theory using the new scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on a short balanced F scale, developed by sociologist J.J. Ray. By following the procedure of sociologists D. Byrne and C. Bounds, Ray has been able to construct a balanced F scale with correlations of up to -.7 between its two halves. With 28 ponderous items, it is, however, a little long for many survey applications. This short scale was administered to an Australia-wide mail sample by a commercial polling organization. The demographic structure of the more than 4000 responses closely reflected that of the Australian population. From this pool, 200 responses were randomly selected for analysis. It is reported that like the full balanced F scale, the short form has some repetitious and contradictory items, but it should be noted that this is also a feature of the original F items used, and the contradictories are psychological rather than exact logical opposites.

Because of the relationship between Hogan's Survey of Ethical Attitudes and the California F Scale, a measure of antidemocratic tendencies and conservatism, Lorr and Zea investigated whether moral judgment can be interpreted in terms of a liberal-conservative dimension. As Hogan's scale correlated significantly with their conservative-liberal factor, they argued that the two factors are equivalent. However, whether moral judgment merely represents a liberal-conservative dimension is questionable, as Survey scores also correlated with a dogmatism factor. To avoid this difficulty, the present study used an alternate measure based on a cognitive developmental stage, rather than character, model. Moreover, Wilson's Conservatism Scale was considered more appropriate as it (a) does not confound conservatism and dogmatism, (b) is free of social desirability factors, and (c) is applicable within the South African context. Since the typical conservative has been described as conventional, conforming, punitive, authoritarian, and antihedonistic, it was hypothesized that conservatism would be positively correlated with conventional and negatively related to principled moral reasoning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study on the success of the sports coach. It has been traditionally assumed that the development of successful athletic teams is based on a strict adherence to discipline, organization, and conformance on behalf of players. It examines the success of high school coaches who exhibit an authoritarian personality. The questionnaire used is a 48-item modified F scale-Rokeach Dogmatism Scale devised to measure the degree of authoritarianism exhibited by a given subject. Reliability was established by administering the test again approximately one week later. Directions for correct completion of the test are given during personal interviews, and the subjects takes the test while the administrator is present. The null hypothesis is examined with use of the Mann-Whitney U Test. Under this assumption, the more successful coaches are not expected to be significantly different from the less successful coaches in relation to their authoritarian nature as measured by the modified F Scale-Rokeach Dogmatism Scale.

The article cites a study on authoritarianism and attitude toward parents. It attempts to relate the construct "anti-democratic" personality, as measured by a modification of the California F-Scale, to specific responses derived independently of that scale to determine the construct validity of the F-Scale. Thirty-one females and 33 males from one class in Exceptional Children and two classes in General Psychology were used as subjects. The procedure was carried out in the classroom situation in each case. It was predicted from the theory of the Authoritarian Personality that low F subjects would list a higher proportion of negative parental qualities than would high F subjects.