From W.A.S.T.E. on FB. With my response. Have at it. Should be interesting.

[Mike Jing]

There seems to be some confusion as to what the "F scale" is.  The
wiki currently points to the "F-Scale":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-scale_%28personality_test%29

But the "F Scale" is also a validity scale of the MMPI, although it
seems to refer to MMPI-2. See for example:
http://www.mmpi-info.com/mmpidict1

"F Scale - Infrequency (Hathaway & McKinley, 1951) (60 items).  Very
high (>T99) possible random, exaggerated, or mis-scored profile. Very
high scores (T> 90) commonly found with psychotic patients. High
scores (>T70), best measure of overall psychopathology, resentment,
acting out, moodiness. Mostly elevations in the F scale are due to
psychopathology; high item overlap with scale 8. Low scores (T<45),
possible fake good profile."

GR V90.8-10  “You’ve seen his MMPI. His F Scale? Falsifications,
distorted thought processes . . . . The scores show it clearly: he’s
psychopathically deviant, obsessive, a latent paranoiac—

In this context, it seems to me that "F Scale" refers to part of the
MMPI, despite the problem with chronology.

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 8:15 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
> F scale critique: bravo!
>
> On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 6:15 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:
>>
>>
>> In terms of science, even taken the soft standards of social science, the
>> F scale was a failure. It claimed to measure deeper dynamics of the mind (in
>> the sense of psychoanalysis), but only managed to identify clusters of
>> social and political attitudes on the surface. And so the issues of
>> conservatism and authoritarianism got mixed up. As a consequence, the
>> authoritarianism of the left could not be detected by the F scale.
>>
>> How little it actually had to to with serious science you realize when
>> confronted with the fact that the answers of test subjects on many issues
>> were evaluated completely different - the Cold War had kicked in, and this
>> required political adjustments - when the F scale was used again by the
>> Frankfurt Institute during the 1950s to, well, measure the 'democratic
>> maturity' of West Germans.  For Adorno and Horkheimer this was no problem,
>> because they considered their theories to stand on their own feet and, in
>> general, used data "only to derive from it concrete questions for
>> investigations" (Adorno). That's the continental style - compare also
>> Luhmann -, and as such, since there has been and always will be a certain
>> gap between elaborated social theory on the one and empirical social
>> research on the other side, perhaps not problematic. But it's funny to see
>> how the F scale is used till today as some kind of fetish to make plausible
>> two things which simply are not true: That the Frankfurt School contributed
>> significantly to empirical social research, and that the societal dynamics
>> of anti-democratic processes can, at least in principle, be stopped by
>> social psychology.
>>
>> In the case of the Frankfurt Institute, the unshakable believe in the
>> general importance of Freud's approach damaged the validity of its social
>> research seriously. While there might be exceptions - the
>> ethnopsychoanalysis of people like Devereux or Morgenthaler -, the use of
>> psychoanalysis for the social sciences seems to me, by now, rather limited.
>> Actually you do not improve one problematic science - sociology - by adding
>> another one in case of which the status as a science is even more
>> questionable. (That Freud, in terms of style, was among the greatest authors
>> of German science prose is nevertheless true.)
>>
>> And I agree with you, Mark, that - the dog-comparison is striking! - the
>> spirit of the whole project is not too far away from Pointsman's Pavlovian
>> social technology. Hey, hey, we're doing Big Science ...
>>
>> If you want to read more on that, you can either have a look at Lorenz
>> Jäger's "Adorno: A Political Biography" (Yale University Press, 2004) or at
>> "Roots of Radicalism. Jews, Christians, And The New Left" (Oxford University
>> Press, 1982) by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter. While Jäger - among
>> the half of dozen biographies that appeared on occasion of Adorno's 100.
>> birthday, Jäger's was the only non-hagiographic one -  delivers an honest
>> account of Adorno's merits and failures and analyses his life in the context
>> of German Jewish history, Rothman and Lichter, who explored the
>> authoritarianism of the New Left, as it unfolded during the students'
>> movement - not only in the US - in the 1960s and early 1970s, with
>> questionnaires  and thematic apperception tests (TATs), discuss the "The
>> Authoritarian Personality" in context of their own research project. To
>> finish this mail, let me give you a longer quote from their instructive
>> study (yes, you could put it on any 'secondary literature' list for
>> "Vineland"!):
>>
>> "The F scale was developed to measure attitudes that typically expressed
>> an underlying authoritarian character structure. Yet there is a crucial gap
>> between Fromm and Adorno's psychodynamic theories and the traits measured by
>> the test. Quite simply, the F scale cannot test the relationship between
>> psychodynamics and sociopolitical attitudes because the scale measures only
>> the attitudes. It's simply assumed that these attitudes express deeper
>> personality trends. (...) Clearly, Sanford and his co-workers simply
>> inferred the alleged emotional substratum of such 'authoritarian' attitudes
>> from psychoanalytic theory./ Whatever the intended latent content of F scale
>> items, their manifest content consists primarily in beliefs about human
>> nature and one's proper relationship to other people. That is, the F scale
>> measures certain aspects of social ideology which may or may not reflect
>> deeper personality dispositions. The most that can be inferred from the
>> correlation of 'F' with other attitude scales is a unified social outlook,
>> rather than the unity of personality and ideology found by Adorno and his
>> colleagues./ All this resulted in considerable confusion as to precisely
>> what it is that the F scale measures. In trying to capture the psychodynamic
>> complexity and latent emotional basis of fascist proclivities with a single
>> paper-and-pencil test, the authors produced the opposite of what they
>> intended. The F scale can create the impression that authoritarianism is
>> nothing more than a set of beliefs, a cast of mind combining political
>> conservatism with intolerance toward social deviance. (...) Use of the F
>> scale has not only led to superficial readings of the concept of
>> authoritarianism but also narrowed the the concept to include only the
>> ideological 'right'. The resemblance of conservative and 'authoritarian'
>> attitudes is so strong that some writers simply treat the two as parallel
>> concepts. But if authoritarianism is nothing more than an extreme
>> conservative ideology, why should it be considered an integral aspect of
>> personality functioning? Edward Shills thus condemned the F scale as
>> 'political attitudes masquerading as personality dispositions ... designed
>> to disclose not authoritarian personality as such but rather the 'Right' ---
>> the nativist-fundamentalist Authoritarian'./ The test was intentionally
>> 'loaded' toward the political right because its creators, who were trying to
>> identify potential fascists, saw fascism as a right-wing phenomenon. But if
>> the potential for fascism lies not in conservative attitudes themselves but
>> in the underlying personality trends they express, there should be some way
>> of determining whether these trends might also be expressed in other
>> attitudes." (pp. 157-159)
>>
>> Attitudes like Frenesi's ...
>>
>>
>> On 04.06.2016 13:20, Mark Kohut wrote:
>>
>>
>> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/
>>
>> Mark Kohut "human character can be measured the same way the temper of a
>> dog can be measured"...'scientific rationality"-----just another variation
>> on the disease so viciously, rightly, righteously, deeply satirized by
>> Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow--and one of his most profound depth charges
>> against America's, the West's, culture of slouching toward death.
>>
>>
>
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