Statements of Cynicism Rated by College Students

The investigation of cynicism by means of testing procedures has been described before the Psychology Section of the Iowa Academy of Science at previous meetings (see references). This paper is a report of a further study of cynicism using the sixty-five items of the short-form of the so-called Practical Policy Test (3). The problem was to determine how strongly cynical these items would be considered to be when the subject does not think of them as applying to himself but attempts to evaluate them objectively . In other words, what statements are considered by college students as expressing the most intense degree of cynicism? Each subject was given a set of the 65 items printed on separate strips of paper, along with five letter-size envelopes numbered and typed so each would constitute one unit of the Scale for Judgments