The clash of social philosophies and personalities in the nuclear arms control debate: A healthful dialectic?

Nuclear arms have forced philosophic conflicts into the open. However, little scholarly research has been conducted on the psychological determinants of behavior regarding nuclear arms. The field stands in need of a new measure specifically geared to issues of confronting policy makers and the public. This article outlines the development of such a measure, namely, the Nuclear Arms Reduction Scale (NAR). Two opposing political stances on nuclear weapons are presented in this 10-item scale, which is keyed in the direction of a pronuclearfreeze (as opposed to a probuild-up policy preference). In samples from West Germany and the United States, correlations between the NAR Scale and other scales from the Barron Inventory of Personal Philosophy showed positive relationships with disposition toward originality, independence of judgment, and complexity of outlook (allp