Half of All Racists Are Left Wing

Although right-wing authoritarian attitudes as measured by the F always predict racism (E), this could be due to any one of several components built into the by its authors. Another designed to measure much the same thing (the A scale) has been found in a sample of army conscripts, not to predict ethnocentrism. It was therefore readministered to a random Australian sample of 99 Sydney people together with a derivative (the AA scale), a balanced F scale, and an E scale. The A scale showed psychometric weaknesses, but, when revised to eliminate these, again failed to predict E. The balanced F correlated 0. 48 with E. Political party preference (vote) did not predict E. On both behavioral (vote) and attitudinal (A -scale) criteria, then, it was concluded that both antiauthoritarian leftists and proauthoritarian rightists are equally likely to be racists.