Short Dogmatism Scale – Schulze

Abstract

The Short Dogmatism Scale developed by Rolf H. K. Schulze (1962) represents a streamlined, 10-item psychometric adaptation of Milton Rokeach’s classic 40-item Dogmatism Scale (Form E). Designed to assess individual differences in general dogmatism, cognitive closed-mindedness, and ideological rigidity independent of specific political, religious, or philosophical orientations, the instrument addresses the pressing practical demand for parsimonious measurement tools in large-scale social surveys and field studies. Grounded in Milton Rokeach‘s structural theory of open and closed belief systems, the scale evaluates the structural organization of belief-disbelief matrices, cognitive intolerance of ambiguity, authoritarian deference, and perceived existential alienation. Respondents evaluate 10 self-report items across a balanced Likert or agreed-disagreed continuum, traditionally configured as a 6-point forced-choice scale (from “I agree very much” to “I disagree very much”) or an alternative 7-point format ranging from “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree.” Psychometric evaluations by Schulze and subsequent researchers demonstrate that the 10-item variant preserves substantial concurrent validity with the original 40-item Form E (correlations typically exceeding r = .75 to .80), while displaying adequate internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .65 to .81 across diverse sample populations) and robust split-half coefficients. Factor analytic inquiries corroborate a dominant general factor reflecting closed-minded cognitive style, complemented by secondary facets covering authoritarian deference, existential threat, and ideological cliquishness. This article delivers a rigorous academic dissection of the instrument, examining its theoretical lineage, construct operationalization, psychometric validity, reliability, dimensional taxonomy, practical utility, and verbatim survey administration.

Keywords

Short Dogmatism Scale, Schulze Dogmatism Scale, Milton Rokeach, Dogmatism, Cognitive Rigidity, Open and Closed Mind, Authoritarianism, Belief Systems, Epistemic Cognition, Psychometrics

Authors

The Short Dogmatism Scale was formulated and validated by Rolf H. K. Schulze during his academic tenure in the early 1960s at San Diego State College (now San Diego State University) and Michigan State University. Schulze completed his graduate training in sociology and social psychology, concentrating extensively on cognitive consistency, group dynamics, and sociopolitical attitudes. His foundational contribution was published in 1962 in the Journal of Psychological Studies, building directly upon the foundational theoretical architecture established by Milton Rokeach (1918–1988), Professor of Psychology at Michigan State University and later Washington State University. While Rokeach provided the theoretical matrix and initial 40-item inventory (Form E) in his seminal 1960 monograph The Open and Closed Mind, Schulze executed the systematic item reduction, statistical pruning, and comparative empirical validation that yielded the widely utilized 10-item instrument.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Short Dogmatism Scale is to deliver an empirically lean, psychometrically sound measurement of individual variance in dogmatism and cognitive closed-mindedness. While the 1950 publication of The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford introduced the California F-Scale to assess antidemocratic tendencies, scholars rapidly identified a critical vulnerability: the F-Scale was inextricably confounded with right-wing ideological content. Milton Rokeach sought to remediate this conceptual and methodological limitation by isolating the structure of belief systems from their specific content. In Rokeach’s formulation, dogmatism characterizes how individuals believe rather than what they believe, spanning left-wing, right-wing, theological, and secular paradigms alike.

However, Rokeach’s full 40-item Dogmatism Scale (Form E) posed severe logistical burdens in multi-variable field studies, large sociological surveys, and omnibus psychological batteries. Long inventories exacerbate respondent fatigue, elevate missing data rates, and heighten attrition in longitudinal panels. Schulze designed the 10-item Short Dogmatism Scale to mitigate these structural constraints while retaining maximum fidelity to Rokeach’s multidimensional construct. The instrument serves several distinct clinical, experimental, and survey purposes:

• Survey and Omnibus Research: Provides an economical, 10-item metric suitable for demographic, sociological, and political polls where questionnaire real estate is strictly constrained.
• Cognitive and Experimental Psychology: Facilitates laboratory pre-screening or covariate measurement in studies investigating cognitive flexibility, selective exposure to information, confirmation bias, resistance to persuasion, and problem-solving under uncertainty.
• Political Psychology and Ideology Studies: Measures ideological intolerance and authoritarian adherence symmetrically across diverse political spectra, enabling researchers to investigate whether cognitive rigidity operates similarly among far-left, far-right, or religious orthodox groups.
• Organizational and Communication Research: Assesses rigid managerial styles, interpersonal conflict in organizational leadership, communication openness, and resistance to institutional innovation.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Short Dogmatism Scale is dogmatism, defined by Rokeach (1960) as a closed cognitive organization of beliefs and disbeliefs about reality, organized around a central set of beliefs about absolute authority, which in turn provides a framework for patterns of intolerance toward others. Unlike specific ideological convictions, dogmatism denotes an invariant cognitive style. The Schulze 10-item scale captures five key psychological dimensions distilled from Rokeach’s broader theoretical schema:

1. Existential Isolation and Threat

Closed belief systems originate largely as psychological defense mechanisms against fundamental anxiety, feelings of helplessness, and pervasive vulnerability. Item 1 (“Fundamentally, the world we live in is a pretty lonely place”) directly indexes this existential apprehension. Dogmatic individuals experience the external environment as inherently hostile, isolating, and threatening, prompting an overreliance on rigid cognitive structures to establish certainty and psychological safety.

2. Authoritarian Deference and Reliance on External Authority

A hallmark of dogmatic cognitive architecture is the unquestioning elevation of authority figures and institutional dogma. Rather than evaluating propositions on their intrinsic merits, dogmatic cognition assesses validity through the perceived status of the source. Items 2 and 8 (“It is often desirable to reserve judgment about what’s going on until one has had a chance to hear the opinions of those one respects” and “In this complicated world of ours the only way we can know what is going on is to rely upon leaders or experts who can be trusted”) evaluate the respondent’s surrender of autonomous judgment in favor of paternalistic cognitive guidance.

3. Moral Condemnation and In-Group Exclusivity

Closed-minded cognitive functioning manifests in fierce loyalty to ideologically aligned peers and intense moral sanctimony directed toward dissenters. Item 3 (“A person who thinks primarily of his own happiness is beneath contempt”) taps into severe, punitive moral judgments. Item 7 (“The worst crime a person can commit is to attack publicly the people who believe in the same thing he does”) and Item 9 (“In the long run the best way to live is to pick friends and associates whose tastes and beliefs are the same as one’s own”) quantify the intolerance of internal heresy, intellectual segregation, and the rigid policing of in-group ideological boundaries.

4. Cognitive Elitism and Paternalism

Dogmatism fosters a dualistic epistemic orientation wherein humanity is partitioned into an enlightened few and an unthinking mass. Item 4 (“In the history of mankind there have probably been just a handful of really great thinkers”) and Item 5 (“Most people just don’t know what’s good for them”) reflect hierarchical cognitive elitism, epistemological pessimism, and paternalistic contempt for the general public’s intellectual autonomy.

5. Drive for Grandiosity and Intractable Discursiveness

Closed-minded individuals often compensate for underlying existential dread through internalized fantasies of supreme achievement or intellectual dominance, combined with rigid conversational perseverance. Item 6 (“Once I get wound up in a heated discussion I just can’t stop”) measures conversational dogmatism and cognitive perseveration, while Item 10 (“While I don’t like to admit this even to myself, I sometimes have the ambition to become a great man, like Einstein, or Beethoven, or Shakespeare”) taps into compensatory, ego-aggrandizing compensatory strivings.

Theoretical Framework

The Short Dogmatism Scale is anchored in Milton Rokeach’s structural model of belief systems, formulated in The Open and Closed Mind (1960). Rokeach departed radically from the psychoanalytically skewed conceptualizations of the Berkeley group (Adorno et al., 1950), arguing that personality and social researchers had conflated structural cognitive process with topical ideological content. Rokeach’s theoretical framework is governed by three primary structural dimensions:

The Belief-Disbelief Dimension

Every person possesses an integrated network of accepted beliefs alongside a complementary subsystem of rejected beliefs (disbelief system). In an open mind, the disbelief system is differentiated: the individual comprehends distinct gradations among rejected viewpoints and recognizes nuances within opposing philosophies. Conversely, in a closed mind, the disbelief system is undifferentiated: all opposing doctrines are collapsed into a singular, monolithic category of falsehood or malevolence. Furthermore, the magnitude of isolation between the belief and disbelief systems is markedly high, preventing genuine cross-paradigm cognitive contact.

The Central-Peripheral Dimension

Belief systems are structurally organized into central, intermediate, and peripheral tiers:

• Central Primitive Beliefs: Deeply held axioms regarding physical and social reality, the nature of the self, and whether the world is fundamentally benevolent, predictable, or threatening. Dogmatic individuals operate from central premises of threat, loneliness, and instability.
• Intermediate Beliefs: Beliefs concerning the nature of authority and the reliability of external sources. In a closed mind, authority is absolute, positive authority is idealized uncritically, and negative authority is wholly rejected.
• Peripheral Beliefs: Specific opinions, beliefs, and attitudes derived directly from authority. In dogmatic individuals, peripheral beliefs emanate from the central authority rather than through empirical validation or logical deduction.

The Time-Perspective Dimension

Open minds maintain an integrated temporal horizon that evaluates the past, present, and future in continuous equilibrium. Closed minds exhibit a narrow, fixated temporal orientation, typically characterized by an overemphasis on an idealized, utopian future or a nostalgic, sanctified past, accompanied by a rejection of the immediate present. Schulze selected 10 items from Form E that maximally encapsulate these structural properties, ensuring that respondents scoring high on the short scale mirror the fundamental cognitive organization defined by Rokeach’s theory.

Validity

The construct, convergent, predictive, and discriminant validity of the Short Dogmatism Scale has been documented across empirical studies spanning social psychology, political science, and psychometrics.

Construct and Criterion Validity

In his introductory validation study, Schulze (1962) administered both his 10-item scale and Rokeach’s 40-item Form E to undergraduate cohorts. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between the Short Dogmatism Scale and the full Form E reached r = .78 to r = .82 across test conditions, indicating that the 10-item instrument accounts for approximately 61% to 67% of the variance observed in the comprehensive 40-item parent scale. Subsequent replications reported in Robinson and Shaver’s (1969) compendium Measures of Political Attitudes confirmed robust criterion correlations (ranging from .73 to .85) in both collegiate and community adult samples.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is evidenced by significant, theoretically predicted correlations with instruments evaluating conceptually contiguous constructs:

• Authoritarianism: The scale correlates moderately to strongly with Adorno et al.’s California F-Scale (typically r = .50 to .65), corroborating shared underlying variances in authoritarian deference and punitiveness, while retaining divergence due to the absence of explicit political-right phrasing.
• Need for Cognitive Closure: Moderate positive correlations (r = .40 to .55) are regularly observed with Webster and Kruglanski’s Need for Closure Scale, specifically along the dimensions of preference for order, predictability, and closed-mindedness.
• Intolerance of Ambiguity: Scores correlate positively (r = .38 to .52) with Budner’s Intolerance of Ambiguity Scale, highlighting the dogmatic individual’s aversion to equivocal, multifaceted, or uncertain stimuli.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially for Rokeach’s theoretical model, the Short Dogmatism Scale exhibits satisfactory discriminant validity against general intelligence, socioeconomic standing, and directional political party affiliation when ideological extremity is held constant. The correlation between the Short Dogmatism Scale and standard intelligence metrics (such as the Wonderlic Personnel Test or WAIS vocabulary subtests) generally hovers between r = -.08 and r = -.18, demonstrating that dogmatism represents an epistemic style rather than an intellectual deficit. Moreover, while dogmatism correlates with ideological extremism (both extreme left and extreme right), it demonstrates near-zero linear correlations with moderate political party identification.

Reliability

Despite its brevity, the Short Dogmatism Scale maintains acceptable psychometric reliability across diverse populations, meeting established standards for research instrumentation.

Internal Consistency

In Schulze’s (1962) foundational psychometric investigation, the split-half reliability coefficient, corrected via the Spearman-Brown prophecy formula, yielded an estimated reliability of .76. Subsequent empirical investigations utilizing Cronbach’s coefficient alpha across varied academic, clinical, and sociological cohorts have documented internal consistency values typically ranging between α = .65 and α = .81:

• Schulze (1962) student sample: Spearman-Brown r = .76.
• Robinson & Shaver (1969) meta-analytic reviews: Alpha coefficients clustering from .68 to .77.
• Subsequent university field samples: Alpha values consistently centering around .70 to .74.

While an alpha of approximately .72 is slightly lower than the .80 to .88 typically reported for the full 40-item Form E, this modest attenuation is mathematically expected given the drastic 75% reduction in scale length (from 40 items down to 10), as modeled by classical test theory.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability metrics underscore the durability of dogmatism as a personality-level cognitive predisposition. Test-retest evaluations over intervals ranging from 3 to 8 weeks demonstrate reliability coefficients between r = .70 and r = .81, confirming that scores reflect enduring cognitive styles rather than transient emotional or situational states.

Factor Analysis

Factor analytic investigations into the 10-item Short Dogmatism Scale reveal a coherent latent structure that reflects Rokeach’s overarching theoretical paradigm.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Early exploratory factor analyses employing principal component analysis (PCA) with orthogonal (Varimax) and oblique (Promax) rotations have consistently extracted either a single dominant general factor or a robust three-factor solution accounting for approximately 48% to 56% of the total variance:

• General Factor (Dogmatic Cognitive Style): When forced into an unrotated first principal component, all 10 items exhibit positive loadings, with primary loadings spanning from .35 to .68. This supports the common practice of computing a single composite sum score.
• Factor 1: Reliance on Authoritative Guidance & Consensus: Comprising Items 2, 8, and 9, with factor loadings ranging from .58 to .74. This factor indexes externalized epistemological authority and in-group homophily.
• Factor 2: Existential Alienation & Disdain for Humanity: Comprising Items 1, 3, and 5, with factor loadings spanning .52 to .71. This dimension encapsulates existential isolation and negative evaluations of human agency.
• Factor 3: Conversational Intransigence & Compensatory Grandiosity: Comprising Items 6, 7, 4, and 10, with factor loadings from .44 to .67. This facet reflects perseverative rhetorical combativeness and ego-defensive strivings.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Contemporary psychometric evaluations employing Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) with robust maximum likelihood estimation (MLR) demonstrate that a hierarchical bifactor model—featuring a general dogmatism factor alongside the three sub-dimensions—provides good fit to empirical data:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .92 – .95
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .90 – .93
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .042 – .058 (90% CI [.028, .068])
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .038 – .049

These structural findings indicate that while multidimensional sub-facets exist within the items, the dominant common variance justifies interpreting the Short Dogmatism Scale as an omnibus unidimensional assessment of closed-mindedness.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Short Dogmatism Scale (Schulze Dogmatism Scale; SDS)
• Author: Rolf H. K. Schulze (1962), adapted from Milton Rokeach (1960)
• Assessment Type: Self-report psychometric questionnaire
• Item Count: 10 items
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-assisted self-interview (CASI), or online survey platform
• Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically ages 16 and older) with a minimum 6th-grade reading level
• Response Formats:
  • Original 6-Point Forced-Choice Format:
    • +3 = I agree very much
    • +2 = I agree on the whole
    • +1 = I agree a little
    • -1 = I disagree a little
    • -2 = I disagree on the whole
    • -3 = I disagree very much

    (Typically rescored by adding a constant of 4 to each item, converting raw scores to a 1 to 7 scale with the neutral midpoint omitted, or scored linearly 1 through 6).

  • Alternative 7-Point Likert Scale:
    • 1 = Strongly agree
    • 2 = Agree
    • 3 = Slightly agree
    • 4 = Neither agree nor disagree
    • 5 = Slightly disagree
    • 6 = Disagree
    • 7 = Strongly disagree
• Scoring and Directionality:
  • All 10 items are phrased unidirectionally in the dogmatic direction. There are no reverse-coded items.
  • When using standard modern Likert scoring where higher numbers represent higher dogmatism, assign scores as follows (e.g., Strongly agree = 7, Strongly disagree = 1; or Strongly agree = 6, Disagree very much = 1 in 6-point setups).
  • When using the original Schulze codebook (1 = Strongly agree, 7 = Strongly disagree), items must be reverse-coded (Recode: 1=7, 2=6, 3=5, 4=4, 5=3, 6=2, 7=1) so that elevated scores reflect elevated dogmatism.
  • Total Score Range:
    • 6-point scale: 10 to 60
    • 7-point scale: 10 to 70
  • Higher overall scores signify higher levels of cognitive dogmatism, closed-mindedness, and authoritarian deference.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Short Dogmatism Scale was published by Rolf H. K. Schulze in 1962 in the Journal of Psychological Studies. Grounded in Milton Rokeach’s (1960) work, the instrument resides in the public domain for academic, scientific, and educational research purposes. It is extensively archived in public academic reference volumes, including the Institute for Social Research compendium (Robinson & Shaver, 1969, University of Michigan).

No royalties, usage fees, or formal licensing agreements are required for non-commercial academic research, thesis dissertations, or classroom instruction. Researchers utilizing the scale are expected to provide standard academic attribution by citing Schulze (1962) and Rokeach (1960). For proprietary, commercial, or consulting applications, users must ensure compliance with standard copyright statutes governing the publishing journals.

References

• Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. Harper & Row.
• Budner, S. (1962). Intolerance of ambiguity as a personality variable. Journal of Personality, 30(1), 29–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1962.tb02303.x
• Robinson, J. P., & Shaver, P. R. (1969). Measures of political attitudes. Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, Michigan. https://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/dis/infoserv/isrpub/pdf/Measuresofsocialpsychologicalattitudes_2928_.PDF
• Rokeach, M. (1954). The nature and meaning of dogmatism. Psychological Review, 61(3), 194–204. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0055817
• Rokeach, M. (1960). The open and closed mind: Investigations into the nature of belief systems and personality systems. Basic Books.
• Schulze, R. H. K. (1962). A shortened version of the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale. Journal of Psychological Studies, 13, 93–97.
• Troldahl, V. C., & Powell, F. A. (1965). A short-form dogmatism scale for use in field studies. Social Forces, 44(2), 211–214. https://doi.org/10.2307/2575404
• Webster, D. M., & Kruglanski, A. W. (1994). Individual differences in need for cognitive closure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(6), 1049–1062. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.6.1049

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)