The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements by Kevin MacDonald

Author:Kevin MacDonald [MacDonald, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf, mobi
Tags: Jews; antisemitism, pol_guide
ISBN: 9780759672215
Google: QlBFPgAACAAJ
Amazon: 0759672229
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Published: 2002-07-15T17:41:45+00:00

In this regard it is interesting that in addition to the failure to replicate the Berkeley group's central empirical finding of a strong association between authoritarianism and hostility toward other ethnic groups. The Authoritarian Personality also suffers from severe methodological shortcomings, some of which suggest conscious attempts at deception. Besides the "response set" difficulty pervading the construction of all the scales, perhaps simply reflecting naivete in scale construction, Altemeyer (1981, 27-28) notes that the F-scale measuring authoritarianism was constructed by retaining items that correlated well with anti-Semitism. Altemeyer notes, for example, that the item "Books and movies ought not to deal so much with the sordid and seamy side of life; they ought to concentrate on themes that are entertaining and uplifting" appeared on earlier versions of the F-scale and was highly discriminating. However, it did not correlate highly with the Anti-Semitism Scale and was dropped from later

The Culture Of Critique

versions. Altemeyer notes, "Despite the statement... that the most discriminating items on the initial form were carried over to the next model 'in the same or slightly revised form,' the 'books and movies' item simply disappeared, forever. It is not hard to construct a scale which will correlate highly with another if you eliminate items that are insufficiently related with the target" (pp. 27-28).

The suggestion is that highly discriminating items were dropped if they did not correlate with anti-Semitism, despite assurances to the contrary. In fact, Wiggershaus (1994, 372ff) shows quite clearly that Adomo placed a high priority on developing the F-scale as an indirect means of measuring anti-Semitism, that he was little concerned about following normal scientific procedures in achieving this goal, and that his procedure was exactly as Altemeyer describes:

In Berkeley, we then developed the F-scale with a freedom which differed considerably from the idea of a pedantic science which has to justify each of its steps. The reason for this was probably what, over there, might have been termed the "psychoanalytic background" of the four of us who were leading the project, particularly our familiarify with the method of free association. I emphasize this because a work like The Authoritarian PersonaUty... was produced in a manner which does not correspond at all to the usual image of positivism in social science... We spent hours waiting for ideas to occur to us, not just for entire dimensions, "variables" and syndromes, but also for individual items for the questionnaire. The less their relation to the main topic was visible, the prouder we were of them, while we expected for theoretical reasons to find correlations between ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism and reactionary views in the political and economic sphere. We then checked these items in constant "pre-tests," using these both to restrict the questionnaire to a reasonable size, which was technically necessary, and to exclude those items which proved not to be sufficiently selective. (Adomo; in Wiggershaus 1994, 373)

It is not difficult to suppose that the entire program of research of The Authoritarian Personality involved deception from beginning to end. This is

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