On Not Seeing What You Do Not Want to See: Meloen, van der Linden and de Witte on Authoritarianism

Meloen, van der Linden, and de Witte (1996) were puzzled by their finding that their various scales of authoritarian attitudes all correlated at similar low levels with approval for a racist political party. They also reported that the "Directiveness" behavior inventory correlated not at all with political variables. If the validity characteristics of the various scales used are taken into account, however, the implications of their results are clear: The alleged scales of authoritarian attitudes were simply functioning as alternative scales of conservatism and people who preferred leftist political parties were just as likely to be authoritarian as those who preferred racist political parties.