Acceptance of Authority and Directiveness as Indicators of Authoritarianism: A New Framework

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Abstract
Authoritarianism is defined anew as a combination of high directiveness and a strongly pro-attitude to authority. To examine the independence of each concept Ray's Directiveness Scale and the author's two measures of acceptance of authority, the short General Attitude to Institutional Authority Scale and the Authority Behavior Inventory, were administered to 114 college students. In addition, Ss were asked to rate each other according to eight behavioral criteria, half relating to directiveness and half to acceptance of authority. The Authority Behavior Inventory correlated highly with the attitude to authority scale (.76) but nonsignificantly with the Directiveness Scale (-.11). Discriminant validity was also obtained for all three measures with six of the eight peer-group ratings. It was concluded that future research into authoritarianism might usefully employ measures of acceptance of authority (either attitude scales or behavioral inventories) and directiveness, in a complementary manner.