The Fundamentalism Index based on ACL scales

Introduction: The aim of this work was to evaluate the relationship of psychological needs to fundamentalism. More in details, the Adjective Check List (ACL; Gough, 1979) was used to investigate the association between the fundamentalism and the psychological needs or wants identified as important in Murray’s need-press theory of personality. Methods: A sample of more than 500 Italian subjects was administered the ACL and a self-report about fundamentalism (Lith et al., 2005). First, within a developmental sample (N = 343), correlations between the ACL and fundamentalism were investigated by mean of Pearson correlation indices, and a multiple regression approach was used to derive an index of fundamentalism only based on psychological needs. Then, within a validation sample (N = 170) the correlation between this new psychological index and the fundamentalism scale was investigated. Results and discussion: An index of psychological needs for fundamentalism was created and shown to be significantly associated with an actual measure of fundamentalism. Nonetheless, psychological needs only accounted for a small portion of variance of fundamentalism. Therefore, even if psychological needs could partially predict the tendency to be fundamentalists, fundamentalism is a complex construct that is not fully explained only by psychological needs.