Delinquency and attitude to authority: a comment on Reicher and Emler

In their study of self-reported delinquency, Reicher & Emler (1985) use an ad hoc scale to measure attitudes to authority rather than one of the well-validated scales already in the literature. The items they finally used were almost all anti-authority--thus rendering their results susceptible of an explanation in terms of acquiescent response bias. It is shown that such an explanation would indeed provide a powerful account of what they found. Their work is therefore of uncertain meaning.