The Validity of Tomkins's Polarity Scale Among White South Africans

Tomkins's polarity theory and the Polarity Scale derived from it constitute a promising but relatively neglected approach to researching the relationship between personality and ideology. We investigated the psychometric properties of the Polarity Scale with a sample of White South African students (N = 79). Although adequate reliabilities were obtained for various scorings of the Polarity Scale, and previous research has shown that scores on the scale relate to personality and affective differences, in this study the scale failed to show correlations with political party preference, liberalism/conservatism self-rating, or anti-Black prejudice. Only the Humanist subscale had a significant, though not very strong, correlation with acceptance of parental religion. Scores on the Polarity Scale were also significantly, though weakly, related to right-wing authoritarianism. These findings suggest that items in the Polarity Scale did not relate strongly enough to indicators of ideological orientation to indicate that they play a primary causal role as the underlying organizing psychological dimension determining ideological orientation.