Abstract

A 28 item version of the Wilson–Patterson Attitude Inventory was administered to 345 participants (twins, spouses, friends, and others) in the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart. An overall conservatism measure demonstrated impressive construct validity. It had strong convergent validity, demonstrated by correlations of 0.72 and 0.58 with the Altemeyer Right Wing Authoritarianism scale and the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire (MPQ) Traditionalism Scale, respectively. It also had strong discriminant validity, being largely uncorrelated with the other 10 MPQ Scales and WAIS Full Scale IQ. Heritabilities were calculated from fitting models to the variance–covariance matricies based on 54 pairs of monozygotic (MZ) and 46 pairs of dizygotic (DZ) twins reared apart. Conservatism demonstrated significant and sizeable genetic influence (h²=0.56), replicating the results reported in the Virginia 30,000 study of ordinary twins and family members and those of a large Australian twin study.

Author Keywords: Conservatism; Authoritarianism; IQ; Genetics; Twins; Child-rearing

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Method

2.1. Participants

2.2. Materials

2.2.1. Attitude Inventory

2.2.2. RWA

2.2.3. Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire MPQ

2.2.4. Intelligence

2.2.5. Family Environment Scale (FES) and Block Environmental Questionnaire (BEQ)

2.2.6. Socioeconomic status

3. Data analysis

3.1. Age and sex correction for correlations and covariances

3.2. Model-fitting

4. Results

4.1. Correlations of Conservatism with the MPQ scales, RWA and IQ

4.2. Assessment of potential environmental confounds

4.3. Intraclass correlations, assortative mating and model fitting

5. Discussion

5.1. Construct validity of the Conservatism scale

5.2. Robustness of the “catch phrase” method

5.3. Contamination of the RWA scale by intelligence

5.4. Environmental confounds are negligible

5.5. Genetic findings

6. Conclusions

Acknowledgements

References