DOUBLE AGREEMENT AS A POSITIVE FUNCTION OF APPROVAL DEPENDENCE.

Peabody has shown that of authoritarianism items agreed to in the original, twice as many are agreed to as are rejected in their reverse forms. This "double agreement" phenomenon argues for interpreting endorsement of authoritarianism items in terms of response sets rather than on the basis of the content of the item. in a previous paper, the present authors demonstrated that approval-dependent subjects double-agreed more often than less approval- dependent ones. Recently, however, Miklich reported a significant negative correlation between double agreement to Dogmatism items and approval dependence. The present paper presents two subsequent studies in an attempt to resolve the issue. These findings show (a) that a significant positive relationship existed between double agreement and approval dependence and (b) that high approval-need subjects viewed both original and reversed authoritarianism items as more ambiguous. It is suggested that differential perception of item ambiguity by these subjects mediated their tendency toward double agreement, and that certain features of the Miklich design may have minimized the effect of this variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]