The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale<\/strong> (A-R Scale), developed by psychometrician Paul M. Kohn in 1972, is a psychometric instrument designed to measure the bipolar ideological continuum spanning rigid right-wing authoritarian submission on one pole to radical, anti-conventional rebellion on the other. Created specifically to overcome the profound psychometric limitations of the original California F-Scale<\/a> (Adorno et al., 1950)\u2014most notably its pervasive acquiescence response bias stemming from all items being keyed in a single direction\u2014the A-R Scale establishes a structurally balanced 30-item self-report questionnaire. The instrument features 15 classically formulated authoritarian items alongside 15 systematically matched, left-wing ideological reversal items. Administered on a 6-point forced-choice Likert response format ranging from 1 (Disagree Strongly<\/em>) to 6 (Agree Strongly<\/em>), the tool yields an overall index where elevated scores denote traditional right-wing authoritarianism, conventionalism, and submissiveness to institutional power, whereas depressed scores denote anti-authoritarian rebellion, nonconformity, and systemic critique.<\/p>\n Extensive psychometric investigations among diverse adult and collegiate populations confirm that the A-R Scale exhibits robust internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .75 and .85, and stable test-retest reliability across multi-week evaluation intervals. Construct and criterion-related validity analyses demonstrate strong convergent associations with established measures of dogmatism, political conservatism, punitive orientation toward deviance, and ethnocentrism, while displaying negative correlations with cognitive flexibility, civil liberties advocacy, and open-mindedness. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses indicate that the instrument largely captures a prominent primary bipolar dimension alongside recognizable second-order subdimensions representing institutional obedience, moralistic punitiveness, societal rebellion, and supernaturalism\/anti-supernaturalism. Consequently, the A-R Scale remains a foundational psychometric milestone in political psychology, differential psychology, and ideological attitude measurement.<\/p>\n Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale, A-R Scale, authoritarian personality, F-Scale, acquiescent response set, balanced scale, right-wing authoritarianism, left-wing rebellion, psychometrics, ideological attitudes<\/p>\n The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale was formulated and validated by Paul M. Kohn, Ph.D.<\/strong>, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale is to provide an empirically sound, psychometrically balanced operationalization of authoritarian attitudes that effectively neutralizes the confounding effects of acquiescence response set<\/a>. In the decades following the publication of The Authoritarian Personality<\/em> by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford (1950), personality and social researchers recognized that the iconic California F-Scale suffered from a fatal psychometric vulnerability: all 30 items were keyed unidirectionally in favor of authoritarian endorsement. As demonstrated by methodological critics such as Christie, Havel, and Seidenberg (1958) and Couch and Keniston (1960), high scores on the classical F-Scale could reflect genuine authoritarian ideological commitments, indiscriminate agreement tendencies (yea-saying), or a combination of both.<\/p>\n To resolve this crisis of construct contamination, Kohn (1972) engineered the A-R Scale to assess both authoritarianism and its conceptual converse, anti-authoritarian rebellion. Rather than constructing simple grammatical negations (e.g., adding “not” to an existing sentence), which frequently creates confusing, cognitively complex double negatives or logically awkward assertions, Kohn formulated substantive, ideological counter-statements reflecting genuine left-wing, rebellious, and anti-establishment sentiments. This methodology ensured that the reverse-scored items possessed substantive ideological content, capturing authentic anti-institutional rebellion rather than merely passive disagreement.<\/p>\n In contemporary clinical, sociological, and experimental research, the A-R Scale serves several distinct empirical functions:<\/p>\n The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale measures a broad bipolar personality and attitudinal construct that contrasts uncritical submission to established societal, familial, and religious authorities with proactive, radical rebellion against conventional norms and power structures. The construct spans several interconnected psychological dimensions:<\/p>\n At the core of the authoritarian pole lies an intense, generalized need for external guidance and unquestioning compliance with conventional authority figures. This is operationalized through statements asserting that obedience is the paramount virtue children must acquire, that morality equates strictly to legal compliance, and that individuals intrinsically require external figures to dictate appropriate behavior (e.g., Item 1: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn”<\/em>; Item 29: “Our chief want in life is somebody to make us do what we should”<\/em>). Conversely, the rebellious pole conceptualizes obedience as inherently oppressive and morally bankrupt, asserting that individual conscience must supersede external legalities and institutional dictates (e.g., Item 5: “To be a decent human being, follow your conscience regardless of the law”<\/em>; Item 6: “No principle is more immoral than that of obedience”<\/em>).<\/p>\n The authoritarian orientation embraces rigid social stratification, essentialist categorizations of human beings, and social Darwinist assumptions regarding strength and weakness (Item 4: “People can be divided into two distinct classes, the weak and the strong”<\/em>). In direct contrast, the rebellious orientation rejects innate personal hierarchies, attributing societal disparities instead to systemic socioeconomic injustice and institutional inequality (Item 26: “The strong and the weak are not inherently different. They are merely the advantaged and the disadvantaged members of an unfair society”<\/em>).<\/p>\n In concordance with Adorno et al.’s construct of authoritarian aggression, the authoritarian pole advocates harsh, retributive, and physical sanctions against societal norm violators, particularly those engaging in taboo sexual offenses (Item 21: “Sex crimes, such as rape and attacks on children, deserve more than mere punishment: Such criminals ought to be publicly whipped or worse”<\/em>). Conversely, the rebellious pole perceives egregious criminal acts as symptomatic manifestations of a fundamentally disordered and pathological social matrix, arguing for overarching societal restructuring rather than vindictive personal punishment (Item 13: “Sex crimes like rape and child molesting reflect a sick society and we must change society rather than punish individual offenders”<\/em>).<\/p>\n Authoritarian cognition historically exhibits marked fatalism, superstitious external locus of control, and reliance on mystical or cosmic orchestration. On the A-R Scale, this manifests as unquestioning deference to divine or cosmic mandates and openness to esoteric explanations such as astrology (Item 3, Item 17). The counter-pole manifests as resolute rationalism, condemning supernatural beliefs as pernicious self-delusions that foster docile submission to clerical and worldly elites (Item 8, Item 30).<\/p>\n The authoritarian mindset exhibits strong xenophobic anxieties regarding outgroup contact, framing demographic mixing as a physiological or cultural vector of disease and moral contagion (Item 10: “Nowadays, when so many different kinds of people move around and mix together so much, a person has to protect himself against catching an infection or disease from them”<\/em>). The rebellious orientation explicitly advocates for cosmopolitan integration, pluralism, and cross-cultural contact as an enriching collective imperative (Item 18: “Peoples of different nationalities, social classes and races should mix together more. Everybody would benefit from it”<\/em>).<\/p>\n The conceptual architecture of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale is situated at the intersection of psychodynamic characterology, social learning theory, and modern ideological psychometrics. Its theoretical foundation rests upon four seminal frameworks:<\/p>\n The primary theoretical foundation derives from the classical work of Theodor W. Adorno<\/a> and colleagues at the Berkeley Public Opinion Study (1950). Working within a synthesis of psychoanalysis and critical theory, Adorno et al. posited that strict, emotionally cold, and punitively moralistic parenting produces repressed hostility in the developing child. Unable to express anger directly toward punitive parents without incurring devastating retribution, the individual relies on ego defense mechanisms\u2014specifically displacement, projection, and reaction formation. Hostility is displaced onto marginalized outgroups (ethnocentrism, xenophobia), while the vulnerable self identifies completely with powerful authority figures through total submission.<\/p>\n Kohn’s theoretical departure from Adorno et al. was driven by the methodological critiques championed by Lee Cronbach, Richard Christie, Arthur Couch, and Kenneth Keniston. These psychometricians demonstrated that unidirectional scaling conflates cognitive style with substantive ideology. Individuals exhibiting high acquiescent response style (“yea-sayers”) scored artificially high on the F-Scale regardless of content. Kohn realized that for authoritarianism to be validated as a legitimate personality and ideological construct, it had to be decoupled from acquiescence. He posited that true authoritarianism represents a coherent, polarized ideological outlook that must be capable of resisting acquiescence when confronted with equally potent, grammatically affirmative counter-attitudes.<\/p>\n During the late 1960s and early 1970s, sociologists and psychologists increasingly questioned whether authoritarian dynamics were solely the province of the political right. Researchers such as Milton Rokeach<\/a>, in his seminal treatise The Open and Closed Mind<\/em> (1960), postulated that dogmatism and cognitive rigidity can manifest across any ideological domain, including revolutionary communist and radical student movements. Kohn incorporated this perspective by recognizing that ideological rebellion could function as the structural converse to right-wing authoritarianism. Rather than conceptualizing rebellion merely as the absence of authoritarianism, Kohn framed it as an active, substantive sociopolitical stance characterized by iconoclasm, anti-conventionalism, moral permissiveness, and structural critique of established institutions.<\/p>\n Kohn’s work directly foreshadowed the subsequent psychometric revolution executed by Bob Altemeyer<\/a> (1981, 1988) in his development of the Right-Wing Authoritarianism<\/a> (RWA) Scale. Altemeyer abandoned psychodynamic drive theory in favor of Bandura’s social learning theory, defining authoritarianism through three covariable attitudinal clusters: authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, and conventionalism. Like Kohn, Altemeyer recognized that balanced scale construction (using equal numbers of protrait and contrait items) was psychometrically non-negotiable. Kohn’s A-R Scale represents the crucial historical and empirical bridge connecting the psychodynamically grounded California F-Scale with modern social-cognitive operationalizations of authoritarianism.<\/p>\n Empirical evaluations of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale provide substantial evidence for its construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across varied experimental and observational paradigms.<\/p>\n In his seminal validation study, Kohn (1972) demonstrated that the A-R Scale correlates strongly with the original California F-Scale ($r = .65$<\/span> to $.78$<\/span> across samples), confirming that the instrument successfully captures the variance associated with the core authoritarian construct. However, when examining correlations with separate measures of acquiescent response set, the A-R Scale demonstrated near-zero correlations ($r = -.04$<\/span> to $.06$<\/span>), whereas the uncorrected F-Scale exhibited statistically significant positive correlations with acquiescence ($r = .28$<\/span> to $.42$<\/span>). This provided unequivocal construct validation that the A-R Scale measures ideological content rather than response style.<\/p>\n Convergent validity has been extensively demonstrated through correlations with related sociopolitical and cognitive constructs:<\/p>\n Discriminant validity is evidenced by the scale’s lack of substantial association with measures of general intelligence ($g$<\/span>) and verbal aptitude ($r = -.08$<\/span> to $-.14$<\/span>, non-significant), demonstrating that the instrument does not merely reflect cognitive ability or educational attainment. Furthermore, the A-R Scale diverges predictably from measures of general neuroticism and somatic anxiety ($r = .02$<\/span> to $.11$<\/span>), establishing that authoritarianism-rebellion is an ideological and social-attitudinal construct rather than a manifestation of clinical distress or emotional instability.<\/p>\n In experimental and applied settings, A-R Scale scores successfully predict real-world behavioral outcomes:<\/p>\n The psychometric reliability of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale has been evaluated through multiple classical test theory parameters, demonstrating satisfactory internal consistency and temporal stability.<\/p>\n In the original validation investigations conducted by Kohn (1972) involving Canadian university undergraduates ($N = 214$<\/span>) and community adults ($N = 186$<\/span>), the full 30-item instrument yielded split-half reliability coefficients (corrected via the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula) ranging from $.78$<\/span> to $.84$<\/span>. Subsequent administrations evaluating Cronbach’s coefficient alpha across varied demographic groups have yielded values consistently clustered between $\\alpha = .75$<\/span> and $\\alpha = .85$<\/span>.<\/p>\n When evaluated as individual 15-item subcomponents:<\/p>\n The robust correlation between these two halves after reverse scoring ($r = .52$<\/span> to $.64$<\/span>) confirms that they measure opposite ends of a shared underlying psychological continuum rather than two completely orthogonal dimensions.<\/p>\n Temporal stability evaluations conducted across a four-week retest interval among undergraduate cohorts yielded a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient of $r = .82$<\/span> ($p < .001$<\/span>), demonstrating high test-retest reliability. Across an extended six-month interval, stability coefficients remained substantial at $r = .71$<\/span>, indicating that while situational factors and profound socioeconomic crises can induce minor shifts, the core disposition assessed by the A-R Scale reflects a relatively enduring personality-attitudinal orientation.<\/p>\n Structural evaluations of the A-R Scale utilizing both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) reveal a complex, multifaceted latent architecture organized under a dominant primary bipolar factor.<\/p>\n Principal component analyses and principal axis factoring with varimax and oblimin rotations conducted by Kohn (1972) and subsequent independent researchers routinely reveal a strong first unrotated factor accounting for 22% to 28% of the total item variance. This prominent general factor represents the primary bipolar continuum of General Authoritarianism versus Societal Rebellion<\/em>, upon which the majority of items load significantly ($> |.35|$<\/span>).<\/p>\n Upon multidimensional extraction using the Kaiser-Guttman criterion (eigenvalues $> 1.0$<\/span>) and scree plot inspection, four to five secondary, intercorrelated latent dimensions consistently emerge:<\/p>\n Confirmatory factor analytic investigations comparing alternative structural models demonstrate that a hierarchical model\u2014featuring a higher-order overarching Authoritarianism-Rebellion factor governing the specific lower-order dimensions\u2014demonstrates superior fit compared to single-factor or entirely orthogonal models. Typical fit indices from modern CFA studies yield acceptable parameters:<\/p>\n The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale was published in 1972 by Paul M. Kohn in the academic journal Sociometry<\/em> (now published as Social Psychology Quarterly<\/em> by the American Sociological Association). In accordance with standard academic conventions, the instrument was placed in the public domain for non-commercial educational and empirical research purposes. Researchers may utilize, administer, and adapt the items without licensing fees or formal written permission, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Dr. Kohn’s original 1972 publication. Commercial applications, standardized testing incorporation, or distribution for profit require formal copyright clearance from the publisher and the author’s estate\/institutional representatives at York University.<\/p>\n Response Scale:<\/strong><\/p>\n Note: Items marked with an asterisk (*) are reverse-scored items.<\/em><\/p>\n A comprehensive academic psychometric profile of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale (Kohn, 1972), detailing its balanced structural architecture, theoretical integration with the California F-Scale, scoring protocol, validity, reliability, and full 30 authentic questionnaire items.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[858,644,79],"tags":[13271,13273,3425,13270,3424,13272,1622,6],"class_list":["post-3728","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-personality-assessment","category-psychological-testing","category-social-psychology","tag-a-r-scale","tag-acquiescence-bias","tag-authoritarian-personality","tag-authoritarianism-rebellion-scale","tag-f-scale","tag-paul-m-kohn","tag-political-psychology","tag-psychometrics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/3728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/3728\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}2. Keywords<\/h2>\n
3. Authors<\/h2>\n
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4. Purpose<\/h2>\n
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5. Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
Authoritarian Submission versus Radical Conscience<\/h3>\n
Social Hierarchy and Categorization versus Sociological Structuralism<\/h3>\n
Retributive Moral Punitiveness versus Systemic Rehabilitation<\/h3>\n
Supernatural Determinism versus Rationalist Skepticism<\/h3>\n
Intergroup Contamination versus Intergroup Integration<\/h3>\n
6. Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
The Frankfurt School and Adorno et al.’s Authoritarian Personality<\/h3>\n
The Methodological Critique of Response Bias<\/h3>\n
The Concept of Left-Wing Authoritarianism and Radical Rebellion<\/h3>\n
Altemeyer’s Social Learning Reconceptualization<\/h3>\n
7. Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion-Related and Predictive Validity<\/h3>\n
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8. Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Test-Retest Reliability<\/h3>\n
9. Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)<\/h3>\n
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Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/h3>\n
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10. Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
12. References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n
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\n \nDisagree Strongly<\/th>\n Disagree Somewhat<\/th>\n Disagree Slightly<\/th>\n Agree Slightly<\/th>\n Agree Somewhat<\/th>\n Agree Strongly<\/th>\n<\/tr>\n<\/thead>\n \n 1<\/td>\n 2<\/td>\n 3<\/td>\n 4<\/td>\n 5<\/td>\n 6<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n \n