Ability, Acquiescence, and “Authoritarianism”

acquiescence is a problem which remains to be studied.) If a new scale of authoritarianism were to be made composed of items stated in the reverse direction, one would expect the number of agreements to the two scales to be negatively correlated because of opposite content. items in which the extreme wording was retained were used, the expected high negative correlations were not obtained (3, 4, 16, 19). However, Christie, Havel, and Seidenburg (6) showed that high negative correlations can be obtained when the extreme wording as well as the content of the items is modified. Such evidence indicates that consistent responses to F scale items are partly due to the form in which the item is stated. Since correlations reported in many previous studies between the F scale and other variables might have been different had the acquiescent component been controlled (cf. 16, 18), an investigation of the differential properties of acquiescence and authoritarianism would aid considerably in reinterpreting past findings. The place of acquiescence in the authoritarian syndrome may also be partly evaluated in terms of the correlation between acquiescent set and authoritarian content and the differential personality and ability correlates of each. The correlation between the separate components of acquiescent set and authoritarian content in the F scale is of considerable interest theoretically. It has been suggested that the response set in the F scale is in the appropriate