Authoritarianism and interpersonal spacing behavior

When the relationship between interpersonal distance and authoritarianism was examined by Frankel and Barrett (1971), they failed to mention that their main effect for authoritarianism was not significant. Adorno et al. (1950), however, claim that authoritarians like greater interpersonal space. As the measure of authoritarianism concerned (the F scale) has been shown to be largely a measure of conservatism, any relationship observed could have wide applicability. Methodological weaknesses in the Frankel and Barrett paper are noted and a further experiment with 25 student Ss is reported. Correlations of 0.41 and 0.43 between F-scale score and distance adopted from two target persons (confederates) were found. Extensive controls for possibly confounding variables did not alter this result by any more than a minor amount.