However, difficulty arose when an attempt was made to move from “fascist authoritarianism” to “general authoritarianism”. Rokeach points out that one may also recognize individuals who seem to be intolerant and authoritarian but who are not fascistic, anti-Semitic, or politically conservative. 

Thus, Rokeach attempts to move away from a study of either “right” or “left” authoritarianism to an examination of the properties held in common by all forms of authoritarianism, working in terms of belief systems rather than specific content. 

Rokeach suggests that all of an individual’s beliefs within a psychological system, in which the parts may be isolated, segregated, or interrelated without necessarily being logically interrelated, may be viewed as having three major dimensions: a belief-disbelief dimension, a central-peripheral dimension, and a time-perspective dimension. These dimensions and attributes, moreover, may be joined to produce a mind which can be described as varying in the degree to which it is open or closed.

Rokeach describes several defining characteristics of open-closed belief systems, from which the items of the Dogmatism Scale were ultimately constructed. Rokeach proposes that a basic characteristic that defines the extent to which a person’s system is open or closed is the extent to which the person can receive, evaluate, and act on relevant information received from the outside on its own intrinsic merits, unencumbered by irrelevant factors in the situation arising from within the person or from the outside.   

That is, the more open one’s belief system, the more should evaluating and acting on information proceed independently on its own merits, in accord with the inner structural requirements of the situation. Also, an individual demonstrating an open-belief system should be more governed in his actions by internal self-actualizing forces and less by irrational inner forces. Thus, the more he should be able to resist pressures of external  sources to act in accord with their wishes, as well as resist externally imposed reinforcements, or rewards and punishments.

Conversely, Rokeach continues, the more closed the belief system, the more difficult should it be to distinguish between information received about the world and information received about the source. That is, what the external source says is true about the world should become confused and mixed up with what the external source wants us to believe is true, and wants us to do about it.

One may also discuss the defining characteristic of openness-closedness in terms of the extent to which there is reliance on absolute authority. In Fromm’s terms (16), one may discuss rational versus arbitrary authority; in Maslow’s (17), individual differences in “resistance to acculturation.” 

In all of the above formulations, however, one is concerned with the ability to discriminate substantive information from information about the source, and to assess the two separately.

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