PERSONALITY AND DEMOGRAPHIC CORRELATES OF ATTITUDES TOWARDS NUCLEAR WAR AND NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

A measure of nuclear war/weapons attitudes was developed based on factor analyses of the responses of 563 American and Canadian college students to a pool of 118 nuclear war-/weapons-related items. The resulting 60-item measure, the Nuclear Weapons Orientation Measure (NWOM), composed of 11 separate attitudes scales, was administered along with personality and demographic variables to 273 American students. Females were found to differ from males in favoring unilateral reductions in nuclear weapons to a greater extent, viewing nuclear war as more likely, and viewing the potential consequences from nuclear war as less manageable. Among the findings applying for both sexes: perceptions of the Soviets were related to defense mechanisms; sex-role orientation was related to attitudes about bilateral nuclear weapons reductions; religious attitudes were found to be related to attitudes about preparing for nuclear war, and to worry about nuclear war; locus of control was related to perceptions about the likelihood of nuclear war, and to beliefs about the safety of sparsely populated areas during nuclear war. A wide variety of differences between the sexes in correlates of nuclear war attitudes was also found.Dept. of Psychology. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1985 .R645. Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 46-09, Section: B, page: 3256. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1985