Are acquiescent and extreme response styles related to low intelligence and education?

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Abstract

Several lines of evidence suggest that acquiescent and extreme response styles are related to low education or low cognitive ability. Using measures constructed from the World Values Survey, this hypothesis is examined both in comparisons among individuals and comparisons among countries. At the individual level, both acquiescent and extreme responding are positively related to age and negatively to education and income in most world regions. Both response styles are most prevalent in the less developed countries. At the country-level, extremity is best predicted by a low average IQ in the country, and acquiescence by a high level of corruption.

Introduction

Response styles are important for the interpretation of personality and attitude measures by self-report. The most commonly observed response styles, also described as response biases, are acquiescent and extreme responding. Acquiescence refers to (unthinking?) agreement with statements, and extremity to a preferential use of the end points of the scale. Some authors attributed country-level differences in response styles to cultural traditions. For example, Cheung and Rensvold (2000) speculated that the low level of extreme response style (ERS) in Korea might be due to social convention: “Members of low-ERS cultures may desire to appear modest and nonjudgmental, whereas members of high-ERS cultures may wish to demonstrate sincerity and conviction.” (Cheung & Rensvold, 2000, p. 189).

Other lines of evidence suggest that response styles are related to intelligence. Messick and Frederiksen (1958) found low verbal ability associated with acquiescent responding on a modified form of the California F-scale. A more recent study found that on a Caribbean island both acquiescent and extreme responding are associated with low intellectual ability (Meisenberg, Lawless, Lambert, & Newton, 2006, pp. 400–401).

Other observations suggest a negative relationship of intellectual ability or achievement with response styles in comparisons between countries and cultural groups. In the United States, responses of Blacks and Hispanics are more extreme than those of non-Hispanic Whites (Bachman and O’Malley, 1984, Hui and Triandis, 1989, Marin et al., 1992). Smith (2004) found that European countries consistently scored lowest on measures of acquiescence derived from six different surveys. The highest-scoring countries were those with lesser levels of economic development, such as Panama, Nigeria, the Philippines, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

If low intellectual development directly favors extreme or acquiescent responding, we can predict an independent negative association of these response styles with education and intelligence both in comparisons among individuals and in comparisons among countries. The present study tests these predictions with response style measures derived from the World Values Survey.

Section snippets

The World Values Survey

The 2000 wave of the World Values Survey included 118,520 respondents in 80 countries. This is an omnibus survey with more than 200 questions, but only some questions were asked in all or nearly all countries. The raw data are available (on CD) with Inglehart, Basáñez, Díez-Medrano, Halman, and Luijkx (2004). This survey is useful for the present purpose because of the great variety of questions asked and the large sample sizes. Its main weakness is the poor representativeness of the country

Differences between world regions

Extremity and acquiescence were positively correlated, with r = 0.241 at the individual level (N = 79,053 respondents) and r = 0.601 at the country-level (N = 79 countries). Table 1 shows that relative to individual differences within countries, differences between world regions are substantial: up to 1.52 within-country standard deviations for acquiescence and 1.33 standard deviations for extremity. Both response biases are more prominent in economically less developed regions such as Africa, South

Discussion

Table 2 shows that the negative association between education and acquiescence that had been reported by some investigators (Heaven, 1983, Javeline, 1999, Mirowsky and Ross, 1991, Watson, 1992) is a nearly worldwide phenomenon. Also extreme responding is favored by low education and low income in most countries (Table 3). Therefore, psychological factors related to education, such as intelligence, rationality, self-control or self-confidence, appear to suppress both acquiescent and extreme

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