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Rokeach's claim that dogmatism is a measure of general authoritarianism was examined among a sample of 551 British university students. It was found that both high scorers (radicals) and low scorers (conservatives) on Eysenck's conservatism‐radicalism scale scored high on the dogmatism scale, although the V‐shaped curve did include more of the conservative end of the scale. Item analysis showed that nine items tended to elicit a more dogmatic response from conservatives and four from radicals, but 27 did not discriminate. In principal components analysis 38 of the 40 items loaded significantly on the first factor; in varimax and promax analysis the small groups of items identified as ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’ emerged on separate factors. It is concluded that the dogmatism scale can be regarded as a measure of general authoritarianism, but with some bias towards the right. Eysenck's tough‐tenderminded scale was found to correlate with extraversion, and with both it was possible to envisage a weak curvilinear relationship with dogmatism. Conflicting results in previous studies for the relationship between introversion‐extraversion and dogmatism may have been due to the different mean levels of extraversion in the samples. The positive correlation between dogmatism and neuroticism found elsewhere was confirmed.
Smithers et al. (Thu,) studied this question.