Attitudes toward the Negro Scales

Abstract

The Attitudes toward the Negro Scales, developed by psychometrician and social psychologist Lessing A. Kahn (1951), represents a foundational mid-twentieth-century psychometric instrument designed to evaluate racial attitudes among White Americans toward African Americans. Developed primarily to investigate the structural organization of racial prejudice as a function of formal educational attainment, the instrument operationalizes racial attitudes across six critical societal domains: personality, education, employment, civil rights, social relations, and housing. Kahn utilized a rigorous methodological sequence combining Thurstone equal-appearing interval scaling with Likert summated rating methodology. An initial item pool of 140 statements was systematically reduced to 83 items via Thurstone-Chave sorting criteria, subsequently administered using a 5-point Likert-type response format ranging from Strongly Agree (1 or 5) to Strongly Disagree (5 or 1), with intermediate markers of Agree, Undecided, and Disagree. Comprehensive item analysis and internal consistency evaluations yielded three parallel scales containing 12 items each (totaling 36 substantive diagnostic items), designed to represent all six conceptual dimensions uniformly. To minimize response bias, social desirability distortions, and demand characteristics, Kahn embedded these target items among filler or “dummy” items addressing anti-Semitism, authoritarianism, foreign policy, and general political views, adapted in part from the then-contemporary California F-scale. The resulting subscales demonstrated split-half and test-retest reliability coefficients exceeding .85 across diverse educational strata, revealing that higher educational achievement correlates with reduced overt prejudice, increased cognitive differentiation, and higher attitudinal consistency across divergent socio-political dimensions.

Keywords

Attitudes toward the Negro Scales, Lessing A. Kahn, racial attitudes, prejudice measurement, Thurstone-Chave scaling, Likert technique, psychometrics, authoritarianism, racial segregation, civil rights attitudes

Authors

The instrument was conceived, constructed, and psychometrically validated by Lessing Anthony Kahn (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania). During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Kahn conducted pioneering research at the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, examining social attitudes, intergroup relations, psychometric scaling techniques, and the sociodemographic determinants of ethnic intolerance. Kahn subsequently contributed extensively to industrial-organizational psychology, operational systems research, and applied behavioral measurement in both academic and governmental research institutions across the United States.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Attitudes toward the Negro Scales was to establish a standardized, multidimensional, psychometrically robust measurement tool capable of assessing the structural organization, intensity, and behavioral correlates of anti-Black racial attitudes held by White individuals during the pre-Civil Rights era. Prior to Kahn’s 1951 monograph, existing instruments measuring racial attitudes—such as those created by L. L. Thurstone, E. D. Hinckley (1932), or early social distance inventories modeled after Emory S. Bogardus (1925)—frequently treated racial prejudice as a generalized, unidimensional affective predisposition, often ignoring how institutional, interpersonal, and legal domains diverge within an individual’s cognitive architecture.

Kahn specifically formulated the scales to address a vital social question: What is the precise role of formal education in modifying intergroup hostility and restructuring ideological beliefs? While progressive sociologists and educators posited that formal schooling serves as a primary liberalizing mechanism that dissolves irrational stereotypes, empirical evidence regarding whether schooling uniformly alters all facets of racial ideology or merely instills verbal sophistication remained inconclusive. Kahn designed the instrument to dissect attitudes across distinct institutional spheres—such as residential segregation, fair employment practices, political franchise, educational equity, intimate social interaction, and perceived psychological traits.

In addition to basic sociological inquiry, the instrument was engineered for applied experimental and survey research. It offered researchers a reliable mechanism to assess the efficacy of intergroup interventions, track regional shifts in racial tolerance, evaluate attitudinal changes following institutional desegregation (such as the integration of the Armed Forces pursuant to Executive Order 9981 in 1948), and establish cross-sectional comparisons between disparate demographic, occupational, and socio-economic cohorts. By isolating three statistically equivalent 12-item forms, Kahn provided a tool suitable for repeated-measures experimental designs, longitudinal assessments, and pre-test/post-test intervention studies where test-retest practice effects and item familiarity presented significant threats to internal validity.

Psychological Construct

The core psychological construct measured by the instrument is overt racial prejudice directed toward Black Americans, defined within mid-twentieth-century social psychology as a structured system of negative stereotypes, affective antipathy, discriminatory institutional preferences, and social avoidance. Kahn conceptualized racial prejudice not as an isolated behavioral reaction, but as an organized constellation of beliefs and action tendencies distributed across six interrelated content dimensions:

• Personality and Inherent Traits: This dimension assesses stereotypic attributions regarding the characterological, biological, and moral attributes of African Americans. It evaluates endorsements of traditional racist tropes alleging innate shiftlessness, cognitive inferiority, emotional instability, or an orientation toward brute physical force (e.g., assessing agreement with statements asserting that African Americans respect only physical coercion or possess immutable psychological deficits).
• Educational Equity: This domain captures beliefs concerning the access of Black individuals to primary, secondary, and higher educational institutions. It contrasts principles of universal educational parity against institutional segregation, discriminatory funding allocations, salary differentials between White and Black educators, and collegiate exclusion.
• Employment and Economic Opportunity: Focusing on labor market stratification, this facet examines whether respondents endorse occupational caste systems—such as restricting Black labor strictly to manual, subservient, or supervised positions—versus meritocratic access to professional roles, civil service careers, and supervisory authority over White personnel.
• Civil Rights and Political Franchise: This dimension measures support for constitutional equality, institutional justice, legal protection, and voting rights. It directly operationalizes attitudes toward oppressive legal mechanisms of the Jim Crow era, including poll taxes, political disenfranchisement, extrajudicial violence (such as lynching), and unequal access to the ballot box.
• Social Relations and Interpersonal Contact: Addressing intimate and informal spheres of societal association, this subscale measures adherence to social distance norms, anti-miscegenation beliefs, exclusionary fraternal memberships, and the prohibition of interracial socialization in recreational venues such as restaurants, night clubs, and swimming facilities.
• Housing and Residential Integration: This dimension probes attitudes toward spatial segregation, fair housing, restrictive neighborhood covenants, and the integration of public housing developments, evaluating resistance to Black families residing in predominantly White neighborhoods.

Kahn demonstrated that while these six domains share common variance attributable to a general underlying dimension of racial intolerance, individuals do not respond uniformly across all areas. The structural organization of these attitudes differs systematically as a function of education: individuals with higher academic attainment display more integrated, philosophically coherent belief structures, whereas less-educated cohorts demonstrate compartmentalized, highly localized discriminatory attitudes heavily dictated by immediate economic competition and regional customs.

Theoretical Framework

The construction of the Attitudes toward the Negro Scales is situated at the intersection of several prominent theoretical paradigms that dominated social psychology during the post-World War II era. Chief among these was the emerging psychoanalytic and structural critique of bigotry synthesized in The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford (1950). Adorno and colleagues conceptualized prejudice not merely as an isolated collection of cultural misconceptions, but as an outward manifestation of an underlying, rigid personality syndrome characterized by conventionalism, authoritarian submission, anti-intraception, superstition, stereotypy, power-toughness dynamics, and generalized destructiveness.

Kahn incorporated this framework by recognizing that ethnocentric attitudes toward Black Americans frequently co-occur with broader patterns of outgroup hostility, generalized intolerance of ambiguity, and punitive aggression. This theoretical alignment explains Kahn’s deliberate inclusion of dummy items adapted directly from the California F-scale (e.g., items emphasizing absolute obedience to parental authority, belief that the world is divided strictly into the weak and the strong, advocacy of public horsewhipping for sexual offenders, and widespread hostility toward foreign immigrants, Jews, and religious minorities). By framing racial attitudes within this broader personality-ideology matrix, Kahn posited that racial prejudice functions both as a societal norm and as an ego-defensive mechanism for maintaining psychological security against perceived status loss.

Simultaneously, the scale is anchored in the cognitive organization theory of attitudes articulated by Muzafer Sherif, Hadley Cantril, and Gordon Allport (whose seminal work The Nature of Prejudice would later consolidate these themes in 1954). Under this perspective, attitudes represent learned, enduring mental orientations that structure perceptual fields, cognitive appraisals, and behavioral choices. Kahn posited that educational socialization increases an individual’s cognitive complexity, semantic differentiation, and ideological consistency. Educated individuals are exposed to democratic cultural norms and egalitarian rhetoric, which exerts psychological pressure toward internal cognitive consistency. Consequently, Kahn theorized that higher education produces a tightly integrated attitude structure wherein civil rights, employment parity, and educational opportunities are recognized as indissolubly linked components of constitutional democracy, whereas less-educated individuals maintain fragmented attitudes characterized by compartmentalization and unexamined cultural stereotypes.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Attitudes toward the Negro Scales was established through extensive empirical procedures encompassing content, construct, convergent, and discriminant validation protocols:

• Content Validity: Kahn ensured rigorous content representation by conducting an exhaustive review of contemporaneous sociological literature, public opinion polls (such as Gallup and Fortune surveys), existing racial attitude scales, and published southern and northern legislative debates. Statements were generated across each of the six designated behavioral areas (personality, education, employment, civil rights, social relations, housing), ensuring an initial universe of 140 candidate statements. A panel of trained judges evaluated these statements for clarity, semantic ambiguity, and conceptual relevance, eliminating duplicate or idiomatic formulations.
• Construct and Factorial Validity: Construct validity was supported through the method of known-groups comparison and cross-sectional demographic differentiation. Kahn administered the scale across three distinct educational cohorts: individuals with elementary school education, high school graduates, and college-educated populations. As theoretically predicted, mean prejudice scores decreased monotonically as formal educational attainment increased, with college students demonstrating significantly more egalitarian attitudes across all three subscales ($p < .001$) compared to primary-educated respondents. Furthermore, structural intercorrelations between the six sub-areas were markedly higher in the college cohort ($r = .65$ to $.82$) than in the grammar school cohort ($r = .31$ to $.54$), empirically confirming the hypothesis that higher education fosters ideological integration and cognitive consistency.
• Convergent Validity: Kahn established convergent validity by examining associations between the scale items and respondents’ reported histories of intercultural and interracial contact, religious affiliations, and socio-economic indicators. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, respondents reporting extensive, voluntary, equal-status contact with Black peers, colleagues, or neighbors exhibited significantly lower prejudice scores on the primary subscales.
• Discriminant Validity and Control of Bias: To establish discriminant validity and mitigate acquiescence response bias and test wiseness, Kahn embedded the 36 critical items within an extensive battery of non-target filler statements addressing anti-Semitism, political party prohibitions, international warfare, and authoritarian discipline. Item-total correlations demonstrated that while anti-Negro items loaded heavily on the core racial factor, they correlated only moderately with non-racial authoritarian markers ($r = .35$ to $.48$), confirming that the instrument successfully distinguished specific anti-Black prejudice from generalized authoritarian personality trends.

Reliability

Kahn rigorously evaluated the internal consistency and stability of the Attitudes toward the Negro Scales across multiple normative subsamples, demonstrating exceptional psychometric reliability despite the concise 12-item length of each individual subscale:

• Internal Consistency: Reliability estimates were calculated using split-half correlation coefficients corrected by the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula. For the three 12-item scales (Scale A, Scale B, and Scale C), internal consistency coefficients consistently ranged between $.86$ and $.91$ when administered to advanced college cohorts, and between $.81$ and $.87$ among non-collegiate adult community samples. When the three subscales were aggregated into a composite 36-item battery, the overall reliability coefficient exceeded $.94$, reflecting remarkable internal cohesion.
• Alternate-Form Equivalence: Kahn established parallel-form equivalence across the three 12-item iterations. Correlation coefficients between Scale A and Scale B ($r_{AB}$), Scale B and Scale C ($r_{BC}$), and Scale A and Scale C ($r_{AC}$) were observed in the $.85$ to $.89$ range. Mean scores and standard deviations across the three sub-batteries showed no statistically significant differences ($p > .20$), confirming that the three forms could be utilized interchangeably as equivalent measurement tools in longitudinal or experimental designs.
• Standard Error of Measurement: The standard error of measurement ($SEM$) remained consistently low across demographic subgroups, confirming that individual measurement precision was preserved regardless of whether respondents had attained basic grammar schooling, completed secondary education, or acquired postgraduate professional training.

Factor Analysis

During the scale development process, Kahn implemented a two-stage psychometric item selection protocol combining Thurstone equal-appearing interval sorting with Likert-type discriminative item analysis, which served as an early precursor to modern exploratory factor analysis:

In the first phase, 140 candidate items were sorted by 100 judges across an 11-point psychological continuum ranging from extreme favorableness to extreme unfavorableness toward Black Americans, following the classic Thurstone-Chave technique. Items exhibiting high dispersion (ambiguity) as indicated by wide interquartile ranges ($Q > 2.50$) were discarded. This process retained 83 psychometrically sound items that spanned the entire psychological continuum and maintained balanced representation across the six target domains.

In the second phase, these 83 items were administered to an initial validation cohort using 5-point Likert response formats. Kahn computed discriminative powers for each item by comparing the top 27% (highest egalitarianism) and bottom 27% (highest prejudice) scoring quartiles. Items demonstrating weak discriminative power (critical ratios below $3.0$) were systematically removed. The surviving items converged heavily on a prominent general factor representing generalized institutional and social prejudice, which accounted for approximately 42% to 48% of the total shared variance.

Secondary factor analyses conducted on the intercorrelation matrices of the six domain categories demonstrated that while a single higher-order factor accounted for overall prejudice, secondary loadings revealed distinct clusterings between public/institutional equality (encompassing civil rights, voting, education, and basic employment) and private/intimate social distance (encompassing residential integration, night club attendance, hospital ward segregation, and intimate social relations). These factor analytic findings confirmed that White individuals during the 1950s maintained sharper conceptual boundaries and greater resistance regarding private social mixing than regarding formalized, institutional civil rights.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

Below is the structured specification of the instrument parameters, administrative format, scoring methodology, and subscale structure:

• Test Name: Attitudes toward the Negro Scales
• Author: Lessing Anthony Kahn, Ph.D.
• Publication Year: 1951
• Instrument Type: Self-report paper-and-pencil multidimensional attitude inventory
• Subscale Architecture: Three equivalent, parallel forms (Scale A, Scale B, Scale C) comprising 12 items each (36 substantive items total), systematically balanced across 6 domains:
  • Domain 1: Personality and Stereotypic Characteristics
  • Domain 2: Educational Opportunities and Equality
  • Domain 3: Employment, Occupational Caste, and Labor Rights
  • Domain 4: Civil Rights, Franchise, and Legal Protections
  • Domain 5: Social Relations, Interpersonal Association, and Segregation
  • Domain 6: Housing, Neighborhood Covenants, and Residential Rights
• Filler / Masking Strategy: The substantive scale items are intermixed with “dummy” statements addressing anti-Semitism, authoritarian child-rearing, international relations, communism, and general sociopolitical opinions to disguise the primary research focus and minimize social desirability bias.
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type response scale with categorical anchors:
  • Strongly Agree
  • Agree
  • Undecided
  • Disagree
  • Strongly Disagree
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • Items are scored from 1 to 5 points.
  • In Kahn’s primary scoring system, items endorsing segregation, discriminatory practices, or anti-Black stereotyping are scored such that Strongly Agree = 1, Agree = 2, Undecided = 3, Disagree = 4, and Strongly Disagree = 5 (reflecting increasing levels of tolerance/egalitarianism).
  • Positively phrased, egalitarian items (e.g., items stating that African Americans should be given the same educational advantages or should be allowed into any university) are reverse-scored: Strongly Agree = 5, Agree = 4, Undecided = 3, Disagree = 2, and Strongly Disagree = 1.
  • Scores can be computed per 12-item subscale (ranging from 12 to 60) or as a composite 36-item score (ranging from 36 to 180), with higher aggregate scores indicating greater racial tolerance, egalitarian attitudes, and support for civil rights integration.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Attitudes toward the Negro Scales was formally published in 1951 in the American Psychological Association journal Psychological Monographs: General and Applied (Vol. 65, No. 13, Whole No. 325). Under United States copyright statutes prevailing at the time, works published prior to 1964 required affirmative copyright renewal in their 28th year to sustain protection. As an academic psychometric assessment instrument developed for empirical psychological research, the tool is widely accessible in the public domain and scholarly literature for educational, historical, and archival research purposes. Contemporary researchers wishing to reproduce, adapt, or deploy the historical items in modern empirical investigations should appropriately cite Kahn’s original 1951 foundational monograph in accordance with professional ethical and bibliographic standards.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Brothers.
• Allport, G. W. (1954). The nature of prejudice. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
• Bogardus, E. S. (1925). Measuring social distance. Journal of Applied Sociology, 9, 299–308.
• Hinckley, E. D. (1932). The influence of individual attitude on the construction of an attitude scale. The Journal of Social Psychology, 3(3), 283–296. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1932.9918451
• Kahn, L. A. (1951). The organization of attitudes toward the Negro as a function of education. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 65(13), i–39. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0093637
• Likert, R. (1932). A technique for the measurement of attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 22(140), 1–55.
• Thurstone, L. L., & Chave, E. J. (1929). The measurement of attitude: A psychophysical method and some experiments with a scale for measuring attitude toward the church. University of Chicago Press.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)