CONSCIOUSNESS III:  FACT OR FICTION?

David J. Krus and Auke Tellegen
University of Minnesota

Summary.-Reich's tripartite theory of social consciousness, as formulated in his book, The Greening of America, was translated into Consciousness I, II, and III Scales, based on content analysis of pertinent chapters in the book, and quantified. The factor analysis of these scales showed that Consciousness Scales load on two dimensions. Subsequent canonical analysis of these scales, followed by rotation of canonical weights into the simple structure, indicated that substantial amount of variance in the Consciousness Scales can be accounted for by the normative-humanistic constructs.

In the early seventies the bestseller list was topped by The Greening of America (Reich, 1971), a book eliciting a gamut of opinions. To Senator George McGovern, the book was 'one of the most gripping, penetrating and revealing analyses of American society I have yet seen,' whereas to Peter Marin of the New York Times Book Review, it was 'simplistic, misleading, presumptuous.' Reich's book attempted a description of the ideological niveau of the last three generations. The self-interest, aggressiveness, and prejudice of the two older generations (Consciousness I and II) were seen to be in the sharp contrast with the Consciousness III of the new generation.

The present study is an attempt to ascertain the degree of plausibility of Reich's typology and its place within the family of other personality constructs. This involved a translation of Reich's original qualitative and intuitively derived observations into quantitative scales and an empirical exploration of the relationship of these scales to Tomkins' (1964) Polarity Scale, Tellegen's (1972) scales of Authoritarianism and Absorption and subjects’ chronological age. Tomkins' Polarity Scale was designed to indicate ‘how humanistic and how normative in orientation the individual is' (Tomkins, 1964, p. 3). Tellegen's (1972) third generation Authoritarian Scale was designed to relate this construct to the emerging 'big two' personality dimensions of introversion-extraversion and dominance-submission. Tellegen & Atkinson’s (1974) Absorption Scale is characterized by items such as 'textures--such as wool, sand, wood--sometimes remind me of colors or music,' and 'I like to watch cloud shapes change in the sky,' and is moderately related to hypnotic susceptibility.

The descriptions of Consciousness I, II, and III in The Greening of America (Reich, 1971, pp. 20-41, 62-90, 233-285) were converted into the form typical of standard agree-disagree opinion inventories. Items on the Consciousness I, II, and III Scales were combined with items comprising the other scales included in the analysis. Instructions printed on the test booklet were: 'In this booklet you will find a series of statements a person might use to describe his attitudes, opinions, interests, and other characteristics. Please read each question carefully but do not spend too much time choosing the best answer out of the two available.'

The questionnaire was administered by students enrolled in an evening statistics' class at the University of Minnesota. Subjects were their friends or relatives (N = 58). Evening class students generally have more varied backgrounds than full- time day class students, assuring better sampling than the traditional student pools, particularly with respect to the age of the subjects (13 to 57 yr., M =  29 yr., SD = 123).  The obtained responses were analyzed by the factor analysis and by the canonical analysis.

Scales included in the analysis were intercorrelated as shown in Table 1.

Table 1.  Intercorrelations between scales Included in the
analysis and the age of the subjects.