Opinionating Scale

Abstract

The Opinionating Scale (also known as the Rokeach Opinionation Scale, Form C and Form Ce) was developed by social psychologist Milton Rokeach in 1956 as an empirical instrument designed to quantify individual differences in ideological dogmatism, cognitive intolerance, and general opinionation. Developed alongside the Dogmatism Scale (Form E), the Opinionating Scale specifically evaluates the degree to which an individual rejects or accepts others on the sole basis of whether they share or oppose one’s ideological viewpoints. Unlike earlier unidimensional psychometric tools that conflated cognitive style with right-wing political authoritarianism—most notably the California F-Scale developed by Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford (1950)—the Opinionating Scale was architected to assess dogmatic opinionation across the entire political spectrum, measuring both left-wing and right-wing ideological commitments symmetrically.

Comprising 40 self-report items administered via a 1-to-7 agree-disagree response format, the scale is balanced systematically into a 2 × 2 structural matrix: Opinionated Rejection versus Opinionated Acceptance crossed with Left-of-Center versus Right-of-Center political content. This structure yields four distinct 10-item subscales: Opinionated Rejection – Left (OR-L), Opinionated Acceptance – Left (OA-L), Opinionated Rejection – Right (OR-R), and Opinionated Acceptance – Right (OA-R). Psychometric evaluations demonstrate moderate to high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging from .70 to .85 across diverse samples) and robust construct validity when correlated with general dogmatism, generalized rigidity, and ethnocentrism. This article provides a comprehensive academic review of the scale’s historical purpose, conceptual taxonomy, structural factor loadings, psychometric properties, and administrative protocols.

Keywords

Opinionating Scale, Rokeach Opinionation Scale, Dogmatism, Authoritarianism, Closed Mind, Cognitive Style, Ideological Intolerance, Political Psychology, Psychometrics, Milton Rokeach

Authors

The Opinionating Scale was conceived, formulated, and validated by:

• Milton Rokeach, Ph.D. (1918–1988), Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University and later at Washington State University. Rokeach was a preeminent American social psychologist widely known for his landmark contributions to the study of belief systems, personal values, human dogmatism, and the cognitive structure of open and closed minds.
• Subsequent psychometric adaptations, including cross-cultural standardizations such as the British Form Ce, were conducted in collaboration with cross-national researchers and validated empirically in political attitude repositories, including the landmark work of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan (Robinson & Shaver, 1969).

Purpose

The primary scientific objective of the Opinionating Scale is the measurement of opinionation, defined psychometrically by Milton Rokeach as the dispositional tendency to evaluate, accept, or reject other human beings strictly according to their adherence to or departure from one’s own ideological commitments. During the early 1950s, post-World War II psychological research was dominated by The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al., 1950). While revolutionary, the California F-Scale suffered from critical theoretical and methodological limitations, most conspicuously its complete conflation of authoritarian psychological functioning with right-wing fascist and conservative content. Rokeach asserted that authoritarianism, cognitive closure, and intolerance are not exclusive to right-wing fascism; rather, they represent structural characteristics of a cognitive system that can flourish within any ideological framework, including Marxism, Leninism, religious fundamentalism, or radical liberalism.

To overcome this ideological asymmetry, Rokeach established the Opinionating Scale to fulfill two essential scientific functions:

1. Measuring Structural Intolerance Independent of Content: By embedding both left-wing and right-wing political propositions within identical formal sentence frames that express opinionated rejection (e.g., dismissing an opponent as “stupid,” “ignorant,” or a “fool”) or opinionated acceptance (e.g., claiming that “any thinking person” or “all decent people” agree with one’s own stance), the scale operationalizes structural intolerance regardless of the specific sociopolitical content endorsed.
2. Differentiating Cognitive Dogmatism from Left-Right Ideology: The tool allows researchers to isolate a participant’s cognitive style (the magnitude of total opinionation, calculated across all 40 items) while independently diagnosing their substantive ideological leaning (the net difference between agreement with left-wing vs. right-wing propositions).

In research contexts, the scale serves as a foundational instrument in political psychology, social cognition, and the study of interpersonal conflict, intergroup polarization, prejudice, and communicative rigidity. In clinical and counseling analogies, the scale illuminates extreme cognitive inflexibility, maladaptive black-and-white social judgment, and ideological dogmatism that impede empathic interpersonal relationships.

Psychological Construct

The construct of opinionation within Rokeach’s theoretical framework reflects how an individual expresses beliefs and interacts with divergent perspectives. Opinionation does not merely measure the strength of an attitude; it measures the manner of verbalization and the interpersonal evaluation attached to ideological assertions. Specifically, opinionated statements contain two interrelated psychological components: (a) a statement of factual belief or ideological stance, and (b) an overt, emotionally charged evaluation of people who hold or reject that belief.

The construct is operationalized through a balanced four-quadrant structure:

• Opinionated Rejection – Left (OR-L): This dimension measures the tendency to explicitly reject, ridicule, or denigrate individuals who hold conservative or right-leaning viewpoints from a leftist ideological stance. The verbal cues utilize harsh derogatory labeling against political opponents (e.g., classifying them as “pretty stupid,” “simple-minded fools,” or “selfish”).
• Opinionated Acceptance – Left (OA-L): This dimension reflects the dogmatic assertion of leftist premises as self-evident truths that any moral, intelligent, or decent human being must affirm. It leverages social validation rhetoric (e.g., “It’s perfectly clear to any thinking person,” “Thoughtful persons know”) to establish cognitive consensus and marginalize dissenters without rational deliberation.
• Opinionated Rejection – Right (OR-R): Symmetrical to OR-L, this dimension captures the aggressive dismissal and verbal pathologization of left-wing, socialist, or progressive adherents from a conservative standpoint. Opponents are typified as “trouble-makers,” “noisy radicals,” “agitators,” or “fellow travellers.”
• Opinionated Acceptance – Right (OA-R): Mirroring OA-L, this dimension measures the dogmatic framing of right-wing, traditionalist, or anti-communist assertions as absolute, universally obvious verities (e.g., “Any intelligent person can plainly see,” “Plain common sense tells you”).

By contrasting rejection statements with acceptance statements across both ideological poles, Rokeach isolated the cognitive architecture of social categorizing: an individual high in general opinionation relies heavily on affective, polarized evaluations of others based on ideological compliance, demonstrating low tolerance for cognitive ambiguity.

Theoretical Framework

The Opinionating Scale is situated directly within Milton Rokeach’s broader theory of the Open and Closed Mind (Rokeach, 1956, 1960). Rokeach conceptualized human belief systems as organized cognitive structures consisting of three major structural dimensions: the belief-disbelief dimension, the central-peripheral dimension, and the time-perspective dimension.

Central to this theory is the relationship between the Belief System (all the beliefs, expectations, and hypotheses an individual accepts as true) and the Disbelief System (a series of subsystems containing the beliefs an individual rejects). In an open mind, the disbelief system is perceived with nuance, differentiation, and low emotional threat; opposing views are scrutinized on their intrinsic empirical and logical merits. Conversely, in a closed or dogmatic mind:

• The disbelief system is rejected globally and viewed as fundamentally threatening, evil, or absurd.
• There is high differentiation within the belief system, but opposing systems are treated as an undifferentiated mass of hostile viewpoints.
• Adherents of opposing systems are judged harshly, rejected interpersonally, and stripped of cognitive credibility.

Rokeach hypothesized that dogmatism is structural: a person can hold closed, dogmatic structures irrespective of whether their belief contents originate from orthodox Marxism, Christian fundamentalism, classical conservatism, or secular humanism. The California F-Scale had failed to detect closed-minded individuals whose content leaned leftward because its items exclusively measured right-wing authoritarianism (submission to conventional authority, aggression toward outgroups designated by traditional culture). The Opinionating Scale resolved this empirical limitation by constructing an instrument that measures general opinionation ($Total;Score = OR\text{-}L + OA\text{-}L + OR\text{-}R + OA\text{-}R$) as an index of total ideological intolerance, alongside a distinct directional ideological score ($Ideology = [OR\text{-}R + OA\text{-}R] – [OR\text{-}L + OA\text{-}L]$).

Validity

The validity of the Opinionating Scale has been rigorously assessed across multiple empirical investigations involving diverse student, adult, and political party samples:

• Construct Validity: Rokeach (1956, 1960) established construct validity through known-groups methodologies. Administering the scale to groups with confirmed ideological affiliations (e.g., members of Communist, Socialist, Conservative, and Liberal political student associations in the United Kingdom and the United States), Rokeach demonstrated that extreme adherents of both the radical left and the radical right exhibited significantly higher total opinionation scores than moderate, centrist, or non-ideological cohorts, verifying that cognitive closedness is symmetrically distributed across political extremes.
• Convergent Validity: The Opinionating Scale correlates significantly and positively with the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale (Form E), with reported Pearson correlations typically ranging between $r = .55$ and $r = .72$. It also demonstrates statistically significant positive correlations with scales of general cognitive rigidity (such as Gough and Sanford’s Rigidity Scale) and generalized ethnocentrism, confirming that elevated opinionation reflects broader cognitive and social intolerance.
• Discriminant Validity: Research by Hood (1968) and Robinson and Shaver (1969) affirmed that while the content-directional subscales ($OR\text{-}R + OA\text{-}R$ vs. $OR\text{-}L + OA\text{-}L$) discriminate effectively between actual political party voting choices ($r > .60$), the omnibus Opinionation score remains largely orthogonal to simple demographic indicators, general intelligence ($g$), and acquiescence response sets when balanced item framing is observed.
• Predictive Validity: High opinionation scores successfully predict an individual’s inability to assimilate novel, belief-incongruent factual information during laboratory problem-solving tasks (e.g., the “Doodlebug Problem”) and predict hostile interpersonal attributions toward political outgroup figures in simulated debates.

Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the Opinionating Scale (Form C and Form Ce) has been evaluated using split-half coefficients, internal consistency estimates, and test-retest reliability:

• Internal Consistency: In Rokeach’s (1956, 1960) foundational validation samples comprising American university students ($N = 207$) and British collegiate samples ($N = 150$), the total Opinionating Scale demonstrated split-half reliability coefficients (Spearman-Brown corrected) ranging from $.75$ to $.84$. Later evaluations across general community samples identified Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the full 40-item instrument typically falling between $.76$ and $.83$.
• Subscale Reliabilities: The individual 10-item quadrant subscales yield moderate internal consistency: Opinionated Rejection – Left ($lpha = .68 – .74$), Opinionated Acceptance – Left ($lpha = .65 – .72$), Opinionated Rejection – Right ($lpha = .70 – .76$), and Opinionated Acceptance – Right ($lpha = .69 – .75$). The slightly lower subscale alphas are psychometrically predictable given the limited 10-item length of each quadrant and the diverse range of specific historical and policy issues referenced across items.
• Test-Retest Stability: Over longitudinal testing windows ranging from four to six weeks, the full scale exhibits strong temporal stability, with test-retest correlation coefficients consistently reported between $r = .74$ and $r = .82$, confirming that opinionation functions as a stable personality trait rather than a fleeting situational attitude.

Factor Analysis

Early psychometric investigations of the Opinionating Scale utilized centroid factor analysis, while subsequent re-examinations applied exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with Varimax and Promax rotations, as well as confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):

• Two-Factor Content vs. Process Structure: Exploratory factor analyses consistently reveal a strong primary bifurcated structure accounting for approximately 35% to 42% of common variance, split cleanly along ideological content lines: a General Right-Wing Opinionation factor (items from OR-R and OA-R loading heavily, typically between $.45$ and $.78$) and a General Left-Wing Opinionation factor (items from OR-L and OA-L loading between $.40$ and $.72$).
• Hierarchical Structural Model: In CFA models testing Rokeach’s theoretical 2 × 2 typology, a hierarchical second-order factor model—wherein an omnibus, superordinate “General Opinionation / Dogmatic Intolerance” latent factor accounts for the shared covariance between the four lower-order factors (OR-L, OA-L, OR-R, OA-R)—demonstrates acceptable fit to empirical data ($chi^2/df < 2.5$,$text{CFI} approx .90$,$text{RMSEA} approx .055$).
• Verbal Framing Factor: Analyses by psychometric researchers (Robinson & Shaver, 1969) have also identified a secondary method factor reflecting “opinionated rejection” phrasing versus “opinionated acceptance” phrasing, confirming that respondents respond not only to ideological content but also to the psychological valence of aggressive interpersonal derogation versus dogmatic consensus assertion.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Opinionating Scale (Rokeach Opinionation Scale – Form C [American] / Form Ce [British]).
• Developer: Milton Rokeach (1956).
• Construct Measured: Dogmatic opinionation, ideological intolerance, and interpersonal acceptance/rejection of others based on ideological conformity.
• Item Count: 40 self-report statements.
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Opinionated Rejection – Left (OR-L): Items 1 to 10 (10 items)
  • Opinionated Acceptance – Left (OA-L): Items 11 to 20 (10 items)
  • Opinionated Rejection – Right (OR-R): Items 21 to 30 (10 items)
  • Opinionated Acceptance – Right (OA-R): Items 31 to 40 (10 items)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil or interactive computerized survey. Estimated completion time: 10–15 minutes.
• Response Scale: 1-to-7 agree-disagree response scale (traditionally scored from 1 = Strongly Disagree to 7 = Strongly Agree, with 4 representing Neutral/Undecided; or originally marked from -3 to +3 and transformed linearly to a 1–7 scale).
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Total Opinionation Score (General Intolerance): Sum of all 40 items across all four subscales (range: 40 to 280). Higher scores denote elevated general opinionation, cognitive closedness, and social intolerance regardless of political ideology.
  • Left Opinionation Score: Sum of OR-L + OA-L (range: 20 to 140).
  • Right Opinionation Score: Sum of OR-R + OA-R (range: 20 to 140).
  • Net Ideology Score: Right Opinionation Score minus Left Opinionation Score. Positive scores denote right-wing bias; negative scores denote left-wing bias; scores near zero reflect centrist positions or balanced intolerance.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Opinionating Scale was published by Milton Rokeach in 1956 in the journal Psychological Monographs: General and Applied (Vol. 70, No. 18, Whole No. 425), followed by extensive exposition in his 1960 book The Open and Closed Mind. As an academic psychometric tool developed under historic non-commercial university research grants, the instrument is in the public domain for academic research, education, and non-commercial scientific inquiry. Researchers may reproduce, adapt, and administer the scale without licensing fees, provided proper bibliographic attribution to Milton Rokeach is maintained. Contemporary investigators often update specific historical referents (e.g., Bevanites, Franco, Lord Beaverbrook, Alger Hiss) with modern equivalents to preserve ecological validity in current research.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. Harper & Row.
• Hood, R. W. (1968). An empirical test of the validity of Rokeach’s Opinionation Scale. The Journal of Psychology, 69(1), 47–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1968.10543444
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of Political Attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. https://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/infoserv/isrpub/pdf/Measuresofsocialpsychologicalattitudes_2928_.PDF
• Rokeach, M. (1956). Political and religious dogmatism: An alternative to the authoritarian personality. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 70(18), 1–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0093726
• Rokeach, M. (1960). The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems. Basic Books.

Items of the Scale