Education and Prejudice or Education and Response-Set?

Abstract

This paper re-examines the theory of working class authoritarianism and attempts to assess the evidence for a competing interpretatioan of the empirical relationship between education and prejudice which posits that the relationship is heavily confounded with an education-related acquiescence response-bias that derives from differing cognitive styles and cue-searching mechanisms. Our analysis of data from a 1964 national survey of the United States relies mainly otn use of a modified version of Campbell and Fiske's Multitrait-Multimethod Matrix (1959) to ascertain how much of the relationship between education, authoritarianism and anti-Semitism is due to a shared effect of the F and anti-Semitism scales. The analysis also utilizes a path model of the theory of education-related response-bias where the effect of education and general knowledge oan responses to the F-scale and two different measures of anti-Semitism is completely mediated by two unobserved variables, method and pure anti-Semitism. The paper concludes that the theory of working class authoritarianism has depended heavily for support on the use of items phrased as positivelyworded agree-disagree statements that yield an education-related acquiescence response-bias that has very little to do with the respondent's true attitudes.