Comment by jfengel
5 years ago
It feels weird that they'd pay any attention to the 100 midpoint. These questions feel like they're written to make the authoritarians look unreasonable. Which I feel they are, too, but the way it's written the only way to give the more authoritarian answer would be to be either truly delusional or performing as if one were.
That doesn't mean it's useless, but it does mean that the midpoint is arbitrary. If nobody scores above 100 it says more about your test than it does about people.
We might both think that giving the more authoritarian answer would be performing as if one were delusional, but the "high RWA" population he writes about evidently think it's correct.
A mean score of 90 doesn't imply nobody scores above 100, just that the ones below overbalance the ones above. I'd guess (it may be time to hit primary sources?) that when he says "high RWA" he doesn't mean as low as 110, either.
There are footnotes on pp.36-46 discussing the design of the scale. They include why he believes Adorno's design was flawed (it gave high scores to people who simply agreed with every statement), as well as:
(p.43) > "What is a “high RWA”? When I am writing a scientific report of my research I call the 25% of a sample who scored highest on the RWA scale “High RWAs” with a capital-H. Similarly I call the 25% who scored lowest “Low RWAs,” and my computer runs wondrous statistical tests comparing Highs with Lows. But in this book where I’m describing results, not documenting them, I’ll use “high RWAs” more loosely to simply mean the people in a study who score relatively highly on the RWA scale, and “low RWAs” will mean those who score relatively low on the test."