Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale

Abstract

The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale (A-R Scale), developed by psychometrician Paul M. Kohn in 1972, represents an essential methodological and conceptual advance in the assessment of authoritarianism, ideological conformity, and political non-compliance. Originating as a direct corrective to the psychometric shortcomings of the classic California F-Scale (Adorno et al., 1950), the A-R Scale addresses the pervasive confound of acquiescent response set—the tendency of survey participants to agree with assertions regardless of semantic content—by creating a balanced, psychometrically rigorous instrument. Kohn constructed a 30-item self-report questionnaire consisting of 15 conventionally phrased authoritarian items (“protrait”) and 15 ideological reversals (“contrait”) that capture left-wing rebellion, anti-authoritarianism, systemic skepticism, and moral non-conformism.

Unlike earlier balance attempts that relied on simple grammatical negations (which frequently produced confusing double-negatives or psychometrically weak items), Kohn designed meaningful substantive counterparts grounded in the socio-political realities of countercultural rebellion and radical dissent. Respondents rate items along a multi-point agreement-disagreement spectrum. Psychometric evaluations demonstrate that the A-R Scale exhibits robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging from .75 to .85 across diverse normative samples), strong split-half reliability, and high construct validity. It correlates predictably with political activism, attitudes toward legal sanctions, social deviance, institutional trust, and civil liberties. The A-R Scale remains a foundational psychometric tool in political psychology, sociological research, and personality assessment, illustrating how ideological orientation and psychological needs for structure or autonomy manifest across the socio-political spectrum.

Keywords

Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale, A-R Scale, California F-Scale, authoritarian personality, acquiescence response set, balanced scale, left-wing rebellion, right-wing authoritarianism, political psychology, psychometrics, non-conformity, ideological dissent

Authors

The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale was developed by Paul M. Kohn, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Dr. Kohn is an internationally recognized scholar in personality assessment, stress and coping processes, health psychology, and the measurement of ideological attitudes. Throughout his tenure at York University’s Department of Psychology, Kohn published extensively on the psychometrics of authoritarianism, sensation seeking, minor daily hassles, and psychological reactance.

Institutional Affiliation: Department of Psychology, York University, 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario, M3J 1P3, Canada. Archival repository and instrument documentation are historically curated within York University’s behavioral science assessment collections.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale is to provide a balanced, reliable, and valid operationalization of authoritarian versus rebellious orientations that is psychometrically insulated against acquiescence response bias. In the mid-20th century, social psychology was dominated by investigations into the psychological roots of fascism, antidemocratic tendencies, and prejudice following the publication of The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford (1950). However, the original California F-Scale suffered from a critical methodological flaw: all items were keyed in the same direction. Consequently, high scores could reflect either genuine authoritarian ideology or an undifferentiated acquiescent response style (yea-saying).

Researchers attempting to correct this flaw initially used simple mechanical or grammatical negations (e.g., adding “not” to existing F-Scale assertions). As methodological critics like Christie, Havel, and Seidenberg (1958) demonstrated, simple negations often yielded awkward, psychologically ambiguous, or confusing statements that failed to tap into authentic anti-authoritarian convictions. Paul M. Kohn recognized that genuine rejection of authoritarianism in contemporary democratic societies does not merely manifest as passive neutrality or semantic denial; it often takes the form of active political rebellion, ideological radicalism, countercultural defiance, and social critique from the left.

Thus, the A-R Scale was purposively engineered to measure a bipolar psychological continuum ranging from extreme authoritarian submission and conventionalism at one pole to active ideological rebellion, systemic critique, and anti-authoritarianism at the other. The scale serves multiple clinical, civic, and research purposes:

• Sociological and Political Research: Assessing the psychological correlates of voting behavior, partisan identification, political activism, protest participation, and institutional alienation.
• Attitude Measurement: Investigating public attitudes toward civil liberties, law enforcement, the penal system, national defense, foreign policy, and countercultural movements.
• Social Psychological Inquiries into Prejudice: Disentangling whether prejudice, ethnocentrism, and dogmatism are exclusive to right-wing authoritarianism or whether parallel processes exist within rebellious and radical left-wing cohorts.
• Methodological Research in Psychometrics: Providing an empirical benchmark for studying response styles, acquiescence variance, and the dimensionality of political attitudes.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the A-R Scale is conceptualized as a broad, bipolar personality dimension: Authoritarianism versus Rebellion. This construct integrates psychological needs for cognitive order, social predictability, and institutional defense against perceived chaos, contrasting them with inclinations toward individual autonomy, systemic suspicion, anti-institutional critique, and moral permissiveness.

The Authoritarian Pole

The authoritarian pole of the construct reflects the psychological dynamics originally outlined in classical psychoanalytic and social learning models of authoritarianism. Individuals scoring high toward this pole exhibit three core cognitive-behavioral constellations:

• Authoritarian Submission: An uncritical, submissive attitude toward idealized moral, legal, and supernatural authorities. Authorities are perceived as inherently legitimate arbiters of social order whose decrees must be accepted without question (e.g., Item 1: “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important virtues children should learn”; Item 3: “Every person should have complete faith in some supernatural power whose decisions he obeys without question”).
• Authoritarian Aggression and Punocativeness: The psychological predisposition to condemn, reject, and punish individuals who violate conventional social norms or challenge established authority structures. Punitive measures are viewed as vital tools for moral sanitization and societal preservation (e.g., 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”).
• Conventionalism and Social Defense: Rigid adherence to traditional middle-class values, accompanied by existential anxiety regarding social contamination, moral decay, and foreign influx (e.g., 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”; Item 20: “The true Canadian way of life is disappearing so fast that force may be necessary to preserve it”).

The Rebellion Pole

The rebellion pole does not represent mere psychological neutrality or indifference; rather, it operationalizes an active, value-laden opposition to institutionalized power, social stratification, and conventional normative control. This pole encompasses several key components:

• Institutional Defiance and Moral Conscience: The belief that individual ethical judgment supercedes state laws and formal codes. Obedience is viewed not as a virtue, but as a mechanism of dehumanization and subjugation (e.g., Item 5: “To be a decent human being, follow your conscience regardless of the law”; Item 22: “Obedience is the mother of enslavement”).
• Structural Critique and Anti-Hierarchy: Rejection of social Darwinism and categorical class structures. Disparities in human functioning are attributed to defective, unjust socio-economic systems rather than inherent individual moral defects (e.g., Item 26: “The strong and the weak are not inherently different. They are merely the advantaged and the disadvantaged members of an unfair society”; Item 13: “Sex crimes like rape and child molesting reflect a sick society and we must change society rather than punish individual offenders”).
• Radical Social Transformation: An ideological willingness to overturn existing cultural, national, and political institutions in pursuit of social justice and systemic progress (e.g., Item 9: “The Canadian way of life is so resistant to progress that a revolution is necessary to end its injustices and oppressions”).
• Moral Permissiveness and Pluralism: A conviction that human psychological flourishing requires the removal of authoritarian constraints, accompanied by open embrace of multicultural, multiethnic, and cross-national integration (e.g., Item 18: “Peoples of different nationalities, social classes and races should mix together more. Everybody would benefit from it”; Item 23: “True morality only develops in a fully permissive environment”).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale rests at the intersection of Adorno et al.’s (1950) critical theory of authoritarian personality dynamics, Milton Rokeach’s cognitive theories of dogmatism and belief systems (1960), and psychometric theories of acquiescent response styles developed by Couch and Keniston (1960) and Peabody (1966).

Adorno and colleagues originally posited that authoritarianism is a deeply entrenched personality syndrome rooted in psychodynamic defense mechanisms. According to their model, harsh and punitive child-rearing practices instill intense repressed hostility toward parental figures. Unable to direct this hostility toward powerful caretakers due to fear of retribution, the child develops reaction formations of idealized submission to authority, while displacing aggression onto marginalized outgroups and perceived social deviants. Adorno et al. encapsulated this dynamic in nine theoretical components: conventionalism, authoritarian submission, authoritarian aggression, anti-intraception, superstition and stereotypy, power and “toughness,” destructiveness and cynicism, projectivity, and exaggerated sexual concerns.

Despite its conceptual richness, the F-Scale was challenged methodologically by Christie and Jahoda (1954), who argued that the instrument measured only “right-wing” authoritarianism and ignored authoritarian structures that could manifest in left-wing or revolutionary movements. Furthermore, psychometricians demonstrated that because all original F-Scale items were keyed in an authoritarian direction, correlation coefficients between the F-Scale and other scales (e.g., ethnocentrism, misanthropy) were inflated by shared acquiescence variance. When individuals who tend to agree with any seemingly plausible or authoritative statement complete an all-protrait scale, their scores are artificially elevated, confounding personality variance with stylistic response bias.

Kohn formulated the theoretical architecture of the A-R Scale on the premise that genuine personality measurement requires a balanced scale containing both protrait (authoritarian) and contrait (rebellious) items that are psychologically and semantically meaningful. Drawing on the sociopolitical climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s—characterized by student protest movements, civil rights activism, anti-war demonstrations, and countercultural experimentation—Kohn theorized that anti-authoritarianism had crystalized into a cohesive psychological and ideological orientation: rebellion. By matching authoritarian assertions with their psychological antitheses rooted in revolutionary, egalitarian, and anti-statist philosophies, the A-R Scale provides an operationalization wherein acquiescent tendencies cancel out mathematically across the 30 items, leaving a clean measure of the substantive ideological construct.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale has been evaluated across multiple empirical investigations involving university undergraduates, adult community samples, political organizers, and civic groups.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by significant, theoretically predictable correlations between the A-R Scale and established psychological and behavioral indicators:

• Correlations with the California F-Scale: In Kohn’s foundational 1972 study, the A-R Scale correlated substantially with the original California F-Scale (correlations typically exceeding r = .65 to .75), demonstrating that the A-R Scale preserves the core variance of the original authoritarian construct while eliminating stylistic acquiescence error.
• Dogmatism and Intolerance of Ambiguity: Authoritarian scores on the A-R Scale correlate positively with Rokeach’s Dogmatism Scale and Budner’s Intolerance of Ambiguity Scale, confirming that high-authoritarian scorers prefer rigid cognitive structures, unequivocal rules, and ideological certitude.
• Punitiveness and Legal Sanctions: In empirical validation trials, participants scoring high on the authoritarian pole demonstrated significantly greater support for capital punishment, mandatory minimum sentencing, harsh corporal punishment for sex offenders, and state censorship. Conversely, those scoring at the rebellious pole favored restorative justice, systemic rehabilitation, and absolute protection of speech.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, Kohn (1972) demonstrated that the A-R Scale exhibits divergent validity with respect to isolated acquiescence response measures. While the original F-Scale showed moderate to strong positive correlations with unrelated measures of yea-saying (such as Couch and Keniston’s overall agreement score), the balanced A-R Scale demonstrated near-zero correlations with acquiescent response style. This confirms that score variance reflects authentic ideological and psychological divergence rather than test-taking artifacts.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale effectively differentiates between groups known to differ in socio-political ideology:

• Political Party Affiliation: Members of conservative and right-leaning political organizations score significantly higher toward the authoritarian pole, whereas members of democratic socialist, environmentalist, and radical student organizations score heavily toward the rebellion pole.
• Protest Participation: Longitudinal and cross-sectional studies confirmed that students scoring high on the rebellion dimension had significantly higher rates of participation in peaceful civil disobedience, student strikes, and anti-war demonstrations compared to low-rebellion peers.
• Attitudes Toward Substance Use and Morality: Rebellious scoring aligns with tolerant attitudes toward drug decriminalization, non-traditional family structures, and personal autonomy in private moral decisions, whereas authoritarian scoring corresponds to strict adherence to traditional prohibitions.

Reliability

The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale demonstrates strong psychometric reliability across internal consistency, split-half, and test-retest indices in diverse testing environments.

Internal Consistency

In Kohn’s initial development study (1972) involving undergraduate students at York University, the overall 30-item scale yielded a Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α) of .81, reflecting a high degree of item homogeneity despite the balanced, bidirectional phrasing of the questionnaire. Subsequent investigations using English-speaking North American student and adult cohorts have reported Cronbach’s alpha values typically ranging between .78 and .85.

When examined separately as protrait (authoritarian) and contrait (rebellious) 15-item sub-dimensions, the authoritarian items yielded internal consistency values of α = .74 to .79, while the reversed rebellion items demonstrated alphas of α = .72 to .78. The robust correlation between the two halves (typically r = -.55 to -.68 prior to scoring reflection) demonstrates that the authoritarian and rebellious items function as genuine psychometric counterparts along a shared psychological continuum.

Split-Half and Test-Retest Reliability

Split-half reliability, calculated using the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula matching odd and even items (balanced for item directionality), yielded reliability coefficients exceeding .83. Test-retest stability was evaluated across intervals ranging from four to eight weeks, demonstrating temporal stability coefficients between r = .76 and r = .84 in non-intervention university cohorts. These values indicate that while the scale is sensitive to major sociopolitical socialization, it measures an enduring personality and attitudinal disposition.

Factor Analysis

The structural dimensionality of the Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale has been extensively evaluated using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to determine whether the instrument measures a single bipolar dimension or two distinct, correlated constructs.

Exploratory Factor Structure

In his initial investigations, Kohn (1972) subjected the 30 items to principal components analysis (PCA) followed by varimax and oblique rotations. The scree test indicated a dominant primary general factor accounting for a substantial portion of the common variance (often between 22% and 28% of total variance), which was interpreted as a bipolar Authoritarianism vs. Rebellion continuum. On this unrotated first principal component, the 15 authoritarian items loaded strongly in one direction (loadings ranging from +.35 to +.68), while the 15 rebellious items loaded strongly in the opposite direction (loadings ranging from -.32 to -.64).

Subsequent multi-factor extractions consistently reveal secondary, meaningful psychological sub-clusters:

• Factor I: Institutional Deference vs. Conscientious Defiance (characterized by items concerning obedience to law, state authority, and parental mandates; e.g., Items 1, 5, 6, 22, 25, 27, 28).
• Factor II: Socio-Cultural Defense and Punitive Moralism (characterized by items emphasizing harsh penalties, disease anxiety from social mixing, and cultural preservation; e.g., Items 10, 15, 20, 21).
• Factor III: Systemic Radicalism vs. Deterministic Acceptance (characterized by items addressing national revolution, social origin of crime, and structural inequality; e.g., Items 9, 12, 13, 26).
• Factor IV: Superstition and Anti-Rationalism (characterized by items contrasting supernatural obedience and astrology against secular rationalism; e.g., Items 3, 8, 17, 30).

Confirmatory Factor Analytic Findings

Modern confirmatory factor analytic studies comparing a strictly unidimensional model against a two-factor correlated model (Authoritarian Submission vs. Rebellious Autonomy) generally find that the two-factor model provides a marginally superior fit to empirical data (χ²/df < 2.5, RMSEA ≈ .052, CFI ≈ .91, TLI ≈ .89). However, because the correlation between the latent Authoritarian and Rebellion factors is exceptionally high (typically r > -.70), treating the instrument as a single composite bipolar scale remains theoretically justified and methodologically standard in applied political psychology.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Full Instrument Name: Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale (commonly abbreviated as the A-R Scale).
• Author: Paul M. Kohn, Ph.D.
• Original Publication Date: 1972.
• Construct Measured: Bipolar ideological orientation ranging from Authoritarian Submission/Conventionalism to Anti-Authoritarian Rebellion/Radicalism.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil self-report inventory or computerized survey instrument; suitable for individual or group administration.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (reading level approximately Grade 8 or higher).
• Completion Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes.
• Total Number of Items: 30 items.
  • Protrait Items (Authoritarianism): 15 items (Items 1, 3, 4, 7, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 29).
  • Contrait Items (Rebellion / Reverse-Scored): 15 items marked with an asterisk (Items 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 22, 23, 26, 27, 30).
• Response Scale: Respondents circle a single number per item reflecting their agreement or disagreement. Standard implementations use a 6-point forced-choice Likert response format (+3 = Strongly Agree, +2 = Moderately Agree, +1 = Slightly Agree, -1 = Slightly Disagree, -2 = Moderately Disagree, -3 = Strongly Disagree, omitting a neutral midpoint) or a converted 1-to-6 / 1-to-7 agreement continuum.
• Scoring Instructions:
  • Contrait (reverse-scored) items marked with an asterisk (*) must be inverted prior to score computation (e.g., in a 1–6 format: 6 becomes 1, 5 becomes 2, 4 becomes 3, 3 becomes 4, 2 becomes 5, and 1 becomes 6).
  • A total composite score is obtained by summing all 30 recoded items.
  • Higher total scores indicate a higher degree of Authoritarianism (conventionalism, punitiveness, submission to authority).
  • Lower total scores indicate a higher degree of Rebellion (anti-authoritarianism, institutional critique, social permissiveness).
  • Researchers may alternatively compute two separate subscale scores: an Authoritarianism Subscale (sum of protrait items) and a Rebellion Subscale (sum of non-reversed contrait items).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Authoritarianism-Rebellion Scale was officially published in 1972 in the peer-reviewed sociological journal Sociometry (now published by the American Sociological Association as Social Psychology Quarterly). Under standard academic copyright conventions, the scale items and conceptual design were published for open scholarly, educational, and scientific use.

Researchers, graduate students, and academic professionals may utilize the scale in non-commercial research without paying royalties or licensing fees, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Paul M. Kohn (1972). Adaptations of country-specific items (such as substituting national references in Items 9, 12, 16, and 20 for applications outside Canada) are permissible for cross-cultural research, provided the psychometric modifications are documented. For commercial distribution, testing platforms, or organizational consulting diagnostics, permission should be coordinated through the original copyright holder (American Sociological Association) or the author’s academic estate at York University.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Row.
• Christie, R., Havel, J., & Seidenberg, B. (1958). Is the F scale irreversible? The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 56(2), 143–159. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0041444
• Christie, R., & Jahoda, M. (Eds.). (1954). Studies in the scope and method of “The authoritarian personality.” Free Press.
• Couch, A., & Keniston, K. (1960). Yeasayers and naysayers: Agreeing response set as a personality variable. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(2), 151–174. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040372
• Kohn, P. M. (1972). The Authoritarianism-Rebellion scale: A balanced F Scale with left-wing reversals. Sociometry, 35(1), 176–189. https://doi.org/10.2307/2786555
• Peabody, D. (1966). Authoritarianism scales and response bias. Psychological Bulletin, 65(1), 11–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022643
• Rokeach, M. (1960). The open and closed mind: Investigations into the nature of belief systems and personality systems. Basic Books.

Items of the Scale