Part I

The Measurement of Ideological Trends

Chapter VII

The Measurement of Implicit Antidemocratic Trends

A. Introduction

At a certain stage of the study, after considerable work with the A[nti]-S[emitism] and E[thnocentrism] scales had been done, there gradually evolved a plan for constructing a scale that would measure prejudice without appearing to have this aim and without mentioning the name of any minority group. It appeared that such an instrument, if it correlated highly enough with the A-S and E scales, might prove to be a very useful substitute for them. It might be used to survey opinion in groups where »racial questions« were too »ticklish« a matter to permit the introduction of an A-S or E scale, e.g., a group which included many members of one or another ethnic minority. It might be used for measuring prejudice among minority group members themselves. Most important, by circumventing some of the defenses which people employ when asked to express themselves with respect to »race issues,« it might provide a more valid measure of prejudice.

The P[olitico-] E[conomic] C[onservatism] scale might have commended itself as an index of prejudice, but its correlations with the A-S and E scales did not approach being high enough. Moreover, the items of this scale were too explicitly ideological, that is, they might be too readily associated with prejudice in some logical or automatic way. What was needed was a collection of items each of which was correlated with A-S and E but which did not come from an area ordinarily covered in discussions of political, economic, and social matters. The natural place to turn was to the clinical material already collected, where, particularly in the subjects' discussions of such topics as the self, family, sex, interpersonal relations, moral and personal values, there had appeared numerous trends which, it appeared, might be connected with prejudice.

At this point the second – and major – purpose of the new scale began to take shape. Might not such a scale yield a valid estimate of antidemocratic tendencies at the personality level? It was clear, at the time the new scale was being planned, that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism were not merely matters of surface opinion, but general tendencies with sources, in part at least, deep within the structure of the person. Would it not be possible to construct a scale that would approach more directly these deeper, often unconscious forces? If so, and if the scale could be validated by means of later clinical studies, would we not have a better estimate of antidemocratic potential than could be obtained from the scales that were more openly ideological? The prospect was intriguing. And experience with clinical techniques and with the other scales gave considerable promise of success. In attempting to account for the generality of A-S and of E, to explain what it was that made the diverse items of these scales go together, we had been led to the formulation of enduring psychological dispositions in the person – stereotypy, conventionalism, concern with power, and so forth. Study of the ideological discussions of individuals, e.g., Mack and Larry,^[1] had had the same outcome: there appeared to be dispositions in each individual that were reflected in his discussion of each ideological area as well as in his discussion of matters not ordinarily regarded as ideological. And when clinical-genetic material was examined, it appeared that these dispositions could frequently be referred to deep-lying personality needs. The task then was to formulate scale items which, though they were statements of opinions and attitudes and had the same form as those appearing in ordinary opinion-attitude questionnaires, would actually serve as »giveaways« of underlying antidemocratic trends in the personality.

This would make it possible to carry over into group studies the insights and hypotheses derived from clinical investigation; it would test whether we could study on a mass scale features ordinarily regarded as individualistic and qualitative.

This second purpose – the quantification of antidemocratic trends at the level of personality – did not supersede the first, that of measuring anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism without mentioning minority groups or current politico-economic issues. Rather, it seemed that the two might be realized together. The notion was that A-S and E would correlate with the new scale because the A-S and E responses were strongly influenced by the underlying trends which the new scale sought to get at by a different approach. Indeed, if such a correlation could be obtained it could be taken as evidence that anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism were not isolated or specific or entirely superficial attitudes but expressions of persistent tendencies in the person. This would depend, however, upon how successful was the attempt to exclude from the new scale items which might have been so frequently or so automatically associated with anti-Semitism or ethnocentrism that they might be regarded as aspects of the same political »line.« In any case, however, it seemed that the discovery of opinions and attitudes, in various areas other than the usual politico-socioeconomic one, that were associated with anti-Semitism and ethnocentrism, would give a more comprehensive grasp of the prejudiced outlook on the world. The new instrument was termed the F scale, to signify its concern with implicit prefascist tendencies.

On theoretical grounds it was expected that the correlations of F with A-S and E would not approach unity. It was hoped that the F scale would catch some of the antidemocratic potential that might not be expressed when subjects responded to items which dealt directly with hostility toward minority groups. True, the items of the present A-S and E scales were, for the most part, so formulated as to allow the subject to express prejudice while maintaining the feeling that he was being democratic. Yet it was recognized that a subject might score relatively low on A-S or E and still, in the interview, where a confidential relationship was established and the interviewer was very permissive, reveal that he was prejudiced. More than this, it had to be admitted that a subject might refuse altogether to express hostility against minority groups and yet reveal features, e.g., a tendency to think of such groups in a stereotyped way or a tendency moralistically to reject social groups other than ethnic ones, which had to be taken as susceptibility to antidemocratic propaganda. If the F scale were to be regarded as a measure of antidemocratic potential – something which might or might not be expressed in open hostility against outgroups – then it could not be perfectly correlated with A-S or E. Rather, the demand to be made of it was that it single out individuals who in intensive clinical study revealed themselves to be receptive to antidemocratic propaganda. Although it was not possible within the scope of the study to use the F scale alone as the basis for selecting interviewees, it was possible to relate F scale score to various other indices of antidemocratic personality trends as brought to light by other techniques. Such trends, it seemed, could exist in the absence of high A-S or E scores.

However, the distinction between potential and manifest should not be overdrawn. Given emotionally determined antidemocratic trends in the person, we should expect that in general they would be evoked by the A-S and E items, which were designed for just this purpose, as well as by the F scale and other indirect methods. The person who was high on F but not on A-S or E would be the exception, whose inhibitions upon the expression of prejudice against minorities would require special explanation.