The Dogmatism Scale<\/strong> (Form E; RDS-E), developed by social psychologist Milton Rokeach<\/a> in 1960, is an established 40-item self-report psychometric instrument engineered to evaluate individual differences in open- and closed-mindedness. Diverging sharply from contemporary measures of political authoritarianism\u2014most notably the California F-Scale developed by Adorno and colleagues\u2014the Dogmatism Scale was formulated to measure the cognitive structure<\/em> and formal organization of personal belief-disbelief systems rather than their specific ideological content<\/em>. Operating across a theoretical continuum spanning from extreme open-mindedness to closed dogmatism, the instrument conceptualizes high dogmatism through cognitive rigidity, pervasive reliance on authority figures, pronounced intolerance toward contradictory viewpoints, an alienated or threatening view of the social milieu, and a selective, future-oriented temporal perspective. The scale utilizes a 6-point forced-choice agreement format (classically transformed mathematically to a 1 to 7 metric) devoid of a neutral midpoint. Psychometric evaluations across several decades have demonstrated solid internal consistency (with Cronbach\u2019s alpha<\/a> coefficients and Spearman-Brown split-half estimates typically ranging between .70 and .85) and adequate test-retest reliability across multi-month intervals (.70 to .84). Factor analytic inquiries have demonstrated both a strong general factor reflecting closed cognitive organization and distinct secondary dimensions representing authoritarian submission, existential alienation, and ideological intolerance. This article presents a thorough psychometric review of the Dogmatism Scale Form E, examining its theoretical architecture, psychometric validation data, structural properties, scoring methodology, and complete authentic questionnaire items.<\/p>\n Dogmatism Scale, Form E, Milton Rokeach, open and closed mind, cognitive style, authoritarianism, belief-disbelief systems, cognitive rigidity, psychometrics, ideological intolerance, epistemic cognition<\/p>\n The Dogmatism Scale was conceived, operationalized, and validated by Milton Rokeach<\/strong> (1918\u20131988), a distinguished Polish-American social psychologist whose pioneering contributions revolutionized the empirical study of personal values, cognitive belief systems, and social attitudes. Rokeach completed his doctoral studies in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley<\/a> in 1947, where he worked in close proximity to the research climate surrounding The Authoritarian Personality<\/em> project.<\/p>\n Throughout the formulation and ultimate publication of the Dogmatism Scale (culminating in his 1960 landmark volume The Open and Closed Mind<\/em>), Rokeach served on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University<\/a>. Later in his career, he held professorial appointments at Washington State University<\/a> and the University of Southern California<\/a>. Rokeach was honored with numerous academic distinctions, including the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). While historical inquiries regarding the scale are anchored in his original university archives, academic usage is coordinated through historical literature and standard institutional repositories across psychological sciences.<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Dogmatism Scale (Form E) is the standardized assessment of generalized cognitive closed-mindedness, characterized as the extent to which a person\u2019s belief system is closed to novel information, alternative conceptual paradigms, and discordant objective evidence. Rokeach formulated the instrument in direct response to what he perceived as profound theoretical and psychometric limitations inherent in the prevailing measurement instruments of the 1950s, specifically the California F-Scale<\/a> (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950).<\/p>\n While the F-Scale was intended to capture anti-democratic tendencies and authoritarianism, its operationalization was deeply entangled with right-wing political extremism, conservative traditionalism, and explicit ethnocentric prejudices. Consequently, individuals exhibiting extreme left-wing authoritarianism, rigid religious orthodoxies of any orientation, or dogmatic commitments to scientific or philosophical systems frequently scored in the \u201cnon-authoritarian\u201d direction on the F-Scale. Rokeach hypothesized that dogmatism is a structural property of cognitive architecture\u2014a generalized cognitive style\u2014independent of ideological content. Form E was engineered to quantify:<\/p>\n In research contexts, the Dogmatism Scale serves as an indispensable tool in social, political, and cognitive psychology for investigating resistance to persuasion, selective exposure to media, interpersonal conflict, prejudice, and problem-solving flexibility under cognitive strain. In organizational and educational contexts, the scale is deployed to evaluate epistemic maturity, cognitive flexibility among prospective decision-makers, and adaptability to complex, ambiguous socio-environmental demands.<\/p>\n The psychological construct evaluated by the Dogmatism Scale is the Open and Closed Mind<\/strong>, operationalized through the structural properties of an individual\u2019s belief-disbelief system<\/em>. Rokeach conceptualized a belief-disbelief system as an organized cognitive framework comprising everything a person accepts as true (beliefs), set against complementary categories of alternate conceptualizations that the person rejects (disbeliefs). Dogmatism represents the structural extreme of closure within this system, spanning five core interrelated dimensions:<\/p>\n A closed mind is characterized by high compartmentalization and isolation among sub-beliefs. Contradictory beliefs may coexist within the individual without conscious tension because psychological barriers prevent them from interacting (e.g., Item 14: \u201cA group which tolerates too much difference of opinion among its own members cannot exist for long\u201d). Furthermore, high dogmatism entails poor differentiation within the disbelief subsystem; all non-believers, competing ideologies, or alternative frameworks are collapsed into a single, undifferentiated out-group (e.g., Item 26: \u201cThere are two kinds of people in this world: those who are on the side of truth and those who are against it\u201d).<\/p>\n The belief system is organized hierarchically across three concentric strata:<\/p>\n Closed belief systems systematically undervalue the empirical present in favor of a fixation on the future or an idealized past (e.g., Item 31: \u201cThe present is all too often full of unhappiness. It is the future that counts\u201d). The future is conceptualized teleologically or millenarian-style, often tied to a single, all-encompassing ideological struggle that justifies personal self-abnegation (e.g., Item 9: \u201cIt is when a person devotes him\/herself to an ideal or cause that his\/her life becomes meaningful\u201d).<\/p>\n Beneath ideological rigidity lies a persistent undercurrent of existential anxiety, personal inadequacy, and perceived vulnerability. Closed belief systems operate defensively, shielding the ego against pervasive feelings of threat through compensatory grandiosity, self-righteousness, and uncompromising adherence to collective causes (e.g., Item 16: \u201cWhile I don\u2019t like to admit this even to myself, I sometimes have the ambition to become a great man, like Einstein, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare\u201d; Item 13: \u201cIt is better to be a dead hero than a live coward\u201d).<\/p>\n High dogmatism manifests in a structural inability to distinguish between the substantive content of an idea and the individual holding it. Disagreement on intellectual or moral grounds is rapidly transmuted into personal condemnation and moral outrage (e.g., Item 11: \u201cThere are a number of persons I have come to hate because of the things they stand for\u201d; Item 39: \u201cMy blood boils whenever a person stubbornly refuses to admit he\u2019s wrong\u201d).<\/p>\n The Dogmatism Scale is anchored within cognitive psychology<\/a> and Lewinian field theory<\/a>, synthesized with psychoanalytic theories of ego defense. Rokeach departed from the psychoanalytic drive-reduction models popular in post-war social psychology by conceptualizing the human organism as an actively organizing, meaning-seeking epistemic system driven by two concurrent, conflicting motives:<\/p>\n In Rokeach\u2019s framework, the relative dominance of these two motivational engines determines the openness or closure of the cognitive system. When threat appraisal is low, the cognitive apparatus organizes information along an open<\/em> trajectory: incoming stimuli are evaluated on their intrinsic merits, external authorities are assessed critically, and belief systems demonstrate high permeability, internal integration, and revision in response to novel empirical evidence.<\/p>\n Conversely, when an individual experiences chronic internal or environmental threat, the defensive motive supersedes epistemic accuracy. The resulting closed<\/em> cognitive architecture defends the ego against catastrophic anxiety by erecting rigid boundaries around beliefs, delegating interpretive responsibility entirely to trusted authorities, and filtering out discordant feedback. Rokeach formalized this distinction as the separation of cognitive syntax<\/em> (the formal rules of structural organization) from cognitive semantics<\/em> (the specific socio-political or religious content of thought). A person can be dogmatic about psychoanalysis, behaviorism, atheism, Catholicism, communism, or laissez-faire capitalism; the underlying cognitive grammar remains functionally identical.<\/p>\n Extensive empirical investigations spanning several decades provide substantial evidence supporting the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity of the Dogmatism Scale Form E.<\/p>\n Rokeach demonstrated construct validity through innovative laboratory problem-solving experiments, most famously utilizing the \u201cJoe Doodlebug Problem\u201d (a complex, non-linear reasoning task requiring participants to overcome embedded cognitive assumptions about physical movement). Highly dogmatic individuals (identified via Form E) took significantly longer to synthesize novel, counterintuitive principles and required substantially more time to abandon dysfunctional mental sets compared to low-dogmatism counterparts, even when controlled for intelligence. Subsequent cognitive experiments have consistently demonstrated that high scorers exhibit greater confirmation bias, struggle with perceptual re-structuring, and exhibit marked deficits in cognitive flexibility during complex deduction tasks.<\/p>\n The scale demonstrates robust, statistically significant positive correlations with related constructs of cognitive rigidity and authoritarianism. Across diverse cohorts, RDS-E scores correlate moderately to strongly with:<\/p>\n Crucially, the Dogmatism Scale demonstrates clear empirical divergence from general cognitive intelligence (IQ). Studies assessing cognitive ability via instruments such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) or Wonderlic Personnel Test report negligible to weak inverse correlations (typically ranging from r<\/em> = -.05 to -.22), demonstrating that dogmatic closure is a distinct structural cognitive style rather than a manifestation of intellectual deficiency. Furthermore, unlike the California F-Scale, the RDS-E has been shown across multiple international samples (e.g., Rokeach, 1960; Gulo & Lynch, 1973) to identify closed-minded cognitive structures among political leftists and secularists at frequencies comparable to conservative and religiously orthodox cohorts, verifying its content-neutral operationalization<\/span>.<\/p>\n The scale reliably predicts behavioral outcomes in interpersonal and socio-political domains. High scorers systematically reject ideologically discordant peers, show heightened selective avoidance of counter-attitudinal literature, exhibit higher hostility during intergroup discourse, and show marked difficulty in integrating newly learned contradictory evidence during negotiation paradigms.<\/p>\n The psychometric stability of the Dogmatism Scale Form E has been documented across dozens of clinical, collegiate, and community populations. Initial investigations by Rokeach (1960) reported internal consistency estimates using odd-even split-half reliability coefficients corrected by the Spearman-Brown formula<\/a> ranging from .68 to .93 across distinct samples:<\/p>\n Subsequent psychometric reviews (notably Vacchiano, Strauss, & Hochman, 1969) reviewing over 100 published investigations confirmed that the internal consistency (Cronbach\u2019s alpha<\/a>) of Form E predominantly stabilizes between \u03b1 = .70 and \u03b1 = .85. While these values satisfy standard psychometric criteria for group-level research, the broad, heterogeneous domain sampling of the 40 items tends to suppress internal consistency relative to more narrowly focused unidimensional constructs<\/span>.<\/p>\n Test-retest reliability evaluations demonstrate strong temporal stability over short- and mid-range intervals. Rokeach (1960) established test-retest coefficients of approximately r<\/em> = .70 over a multi-month period. Later replications (e.g., Gulo & Lynch, 1973; Price, 2000) reported stability coefficients ranging from r<\/em> = .71 to .84 across intervals spanning four to twenty weeks, confirming that the scale captures an enduring cognitive-personality trait rather than transient state-dependent fluctuations<\/span>.<\/p>\n Although Milton Rokeach conceptualized dogmatism as a structurally unified, unidimensional construct, extensive exploratory factor analyses<\/a> (EFA) and confirmatory factor analyses<\/a> (CFA) have revealed that Form E possesses a multidimensional latent structure.<\/p>\n Seminal factor-analytic investigations by Kerlinger and Rokeach (1966), Troldahl and Powell (1965), and Vacchiano, Strauss, and Schiffman (1968) systematically extracted between 3 and 14 primary factors, with the most robust models converging around four or five prominent, replicable dimensions:<\/p>\n Modern confirmatory investigations indicate that while a strict first-order unidimensional model yields borderline goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] < .85, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] > .08), a hierarchical second-order model (wherein a generalized higher-order Dogmatism construct accounts for the covariance among the distinct first-order cognitive factors) demonstrates acceptable fit indices (CFI \u2248 .90, TLI \u2248 .89, RMSEA \u2248 .055). This empirical convergence justifies the continued conventional scoring practice of computing an omnibus total score as a composite index of structural closed-mindedness<\/span>.<\/p>\n The Dogmatism Scale (Form E) was formally released in 1960<\/strong> with the publication of Milton Rokeach\u2019s foundational monograph, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems<\/em>, published by Basic Books. The copyright for the seminal text is held by the estate of Milton Rokeach and Basic Books (HarperCollins). However, consistent with traditional mid-20th-century psychometric instruments published in full within academic research monographs, the scale has long resided in the public scientific domain for non-commercial academic research and instructional applications.<\/p>\n No licensing fee, commercial certification, or proprietary royalties are required for individual scholars, university researchers, or students administering the scale for non-commercial psychometric research, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Milton Rokeach (1960). Commercial deployments, inclusion in proprietary commercial software suites, or modifications for profit-yielding evaluation tools require express formal licensing and permission from the copyright holders.<\/p>\n Response Options:<\/p>\n Original 6-Point Forced Format:<\/strong> Or Alternate 7-Point Likert Format:<\/strong> Comprehensive academic review of the Dogmatism Scale (Form E; RDS-E) developed by Milton Rokeach, assessing cognitive closed-mindedness, belief-disbelief systems, psychometrics, factor structure, and scoring guidelines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[7849,858,2,79],"tags":[12867,12866,15711,4428,15709,5454,15712,6,15710],"class_list":["post-4617","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-cognitive-scales","category-personality-assessment","category-psychometrics","category-social-psychology","tag-authoritarianism","tag-belief-systems","tag-closed-mind","tag-cognitive-style","tag-dogmatism-scale","tag-milton-rokeach","tag-open-mind","tag-psychometrics","tag-rds-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/4617","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=4617"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/4617\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
Purpose<\/h2>\n
\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Isolation and Differentiation within the Belief-Disbelief System<\/h3>\n
2. Central-Intermediate-Peripheral Dimensions<\/h3>\n
\n
3. Time-Perspective Orientation<\/h3>\n
4. Personal Feelings of Inadequacy, Threat, and Alienation<\/h3>\n
5. Ideological Intolerance and Interpersonal Rejection<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Experimental Validity<\/h3>\n
Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
\n
Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
Criterion and Predictive Validity<\/h3>\n
Reliability<\/h2>\n
\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Exploratory Factor Solutions<\/h3>\n
\n
Confirmatory Perspectives and Unidimensional Validity<\/h3>\n
Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
\n
Items of the Scale<\/h2>\n
\n I agree very much | I agree on the whole | I agree a little | I disagree a little | I disagree on the whole | I disagree very much\n <\/p>\n
\n 1 = Strongly agree | 2 = Agree | 3 = Slightly agree | 4 = Neither agree nor disagree | 5 = Slightly disagree | 6 = Disagree | 7 = Strongly disagree<\/span>\n <\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n