The Authoritarians

Next, as we touch the statistical bases, the RWA scale had an “alpha” coefficient of .90 in McWilliams and Keil’s sample. Does that mean it was the boss coefficient, the way an “alpha animal” is the leader of the pack? No. When you’re talking about a personality test, you care a lot about how well the items all measure the same underlying trait, even though on the surface they seem to be talking about lots of different things. That cohesiveness is called the internal consistency of the test, and strong item-to-item cohesiveness makes for a good test. The “alpha” coefficient, which can go from .00 to 1.00, reflects a test’s internal consistency. If a 20-item test has an alpha of .90, it is very boss, just like 90% is a pretty good grade on a test. (Or is it, these days?) (In my day, 90% was an “A” in college. And we wrote our essays on the back of a coal shovel. And our college was located in an alligator-infested swamp twenty miles away in which we died every day. And….)

Finally you should know, if you are a social scientist on the prowl for scales to throw into the pot for your next project, that I have made a pact with the devil. Hell will be the final destination of any researcher who decides to use only part of the RWA scale, or any of my tests, in a study. Some investigators assume they have a right to chop up somebody else’s carefully developed instrument as they wish and claim they are still measuring the same thing. I have yet to see one of these fly-bynight versions that measures the “thing” as reliably, or as validly, as the scale they pillaged, and of course these “scales” all tap somewhat different things depending on which items were dropped. Some of these hare-brained modifications aren’t even balanced against response sets. All this short-weighting introduces unnecessary confusion and error in the literature.

Physicists, astronomers, chemists, and so on learned long ago that it is essential to the scientific quest to standardize measurements, but many social scientists can’t seem to understand that.

Beelzebub has even agreed to my request that these people be forced to listen to badly played banjo music 24/7/365/Eternity while in hell. There will be another room nearby featuring novice bagpipe players, for editors who accept articles that used a mangled version of one of my scales.

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4 The Libertarian Party poll also solicited opinions on a variety of social issues and economic attitudes. RWA scale scores correlated highest with attitudes against same-sex marriage, abortion, drugs, pornography, women’s equality, unconventional behavior and free speech, and with support for the Patriot Act and America’s “right” to spread democracy by military force. In contrast, the relationships with economic issues (taxation, minimum wage, the public versus private sector, free trade) proved much weaker. The data thus indicate, as do a lot of other findings, that high RWAs are “social conservatives” to a much greater extent that they are “economic conservatives.”

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5 If I were you, I’d be wondering how well my results, which are based mainly on my local Canadian samples, apply to the United States. I wondered that too, so I made a determined effort when I started out to repeat my studies with American samples. I almost always found the same things in Alabama and Pennsylvania and Texas and Indiana and New York and Wyoming and California that I had found in Manitoba. Once American researchers began using my measures, I could simply loll by my hearth and read what others turned up in Massachusetts and Kentucky and Michigan and Nebraska and Washington and so on. The bottom line: A strong record of replication has accumulated over time.

Still, sometimes weird things happen. For example, a Colorado Ph.D. student recently told me she found no correlation between college students’ RWA scale scores, and those of their parents—whereas correlations in the .40s to .50s have appeared quite routinely in the past. And naturally other researchers do not get exactly the same results I do in my studies. A relationship of .45 in my study might come in at .30 in an American one, or .60. But if I have found authoritarianism correlates significantly with something in a Manitoba-based study, then a significant correlation has appeared at least 90% of the time in American-based studies that tested the same thing. (That ain’t bad in the social sciences, and I think it’s mainly due to experienced researchers using good measures and careful methodologies.)

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6 The Weschler Adult Intelligence Survey, probably the most widely used IQ test, has a reliability of about .90. So also does the RWA scale, and nearly all the other tests I have developed that are mentioned in this book. (The alpha coefficient, described in note 3, is often used as an index of reliability.) What does that “.90” mean? It tells you that the “signal to noise” performance of your test equals 9 to 1. Most of what you are getting is useful “signal,” and only 10% of it is meaningless, confusing “noise” or static. In these days of high definition television you would be all over your cable company if your TV picture was 10% “snow.” But the reliability of most psychological tests falls well short of .90, you’ll be disheartened to learn— especially after you’re denied a job because of your score on one. You can easily find journal articles that say .70 is “adequate” reliability.

P.S. We’re going to have a lot of technical notes at the beginning of this chapter as I try to anticipate the questions that you might bring up—if you are the careful, critical reader everyone says you are. Eventually the sailing will get smoother. But you don’t have to read these notes, which you see can be rather tedious. They won’t be on the exam.

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7 This isn’t as big a problem with the RWA scale as it might be. Believe it or not, most people don’t writhe over the meaning of its statements. The items had to show they basically meant the same thing to most people to get on the test in the first place. If a statement is terrifically ambiguous, the answers it draws will be all over the lot, connect to nothing else reliably, and explain zilcho. I know because I’ve written lots of crummy items over the years.

But I stubbornly plodded along until I got enough good ones. It took eight studies, run over three years, involving over 3000 subjects and 300 items to get the first version of the RWA scale in 1973. Then the scale was continually revised as better (less ambiguous, more pertinent) statements replaced weaker ones. Only two of the items you answered (Nos. 6 and 18) survive from the first version. The internal consistency of responses to the test is so high, producing its high alpha and reliability, because items that were too ambiguous fouled out of the game during all this testing. So the years spent developing the test paid off. Let’s hear it for fixation. (And can you see why I get so p.o.’d when some researchers chop up my scales?).

But still, to any individual person, any item can mean something quite different from what I intend. And some people will consistently have “unusual” interpretations of the items. And the test, which was designed to measure right-wing authoritarianism in North America, will probably fall apart in markedly different cultures.

While we’re on the subject of what the items on the RWA scale measure, people sometimes say “Of course conservatives (or religious conservatives) score highly on it; it’s full of conservative ideas.” I think this does a disservice to “conservative ideas” and to being “religious.” Take Item 16: “God’s laws about abortion, pornography, and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished.” Knowing what you do about the concept of right-wing authoritarianism, you can pretty easily see the authoritarian submission (“God’s laws…must be strictly followed”), the authoritarian aggression (“must be strongly punished”), and the run-away conventionalism in the underlying sentiment that everyone should be made to act the way someone’s interpretation of God’s laws dictates. The item appears on the RWA scale because responses to it correlate strongly with responses to all the other items on the scale, which together tap these three defining elements of right-wing authoritarianism.

On the other hand the item, “Abortion, pornography and divorce are sins”-which you may agree reflects a conservative and religious point of view—would not make the cut for inclusion on the RWA scale because it does not ring the bells that identify a high RWA loudly enough. You could in fact sensibly agree with this statement and still reject Item 16, could you not? Item 16 isn’t just about being conservative and religious. It goes way beyond that.

(My God! You’re still reading this!) To put it another way, an empirical way: if you look at how responses to Item 16 correlate with the other items on the RWA scale, and then also look at how it correlates with some measure of traditional religious belief, such as the Christian Orthodoxy scale that measures acceptance of the