Who agrees more? The role of age, education, and the ability to solve verbal analogies in acquiescence

Abstract

Acquiescence as one of the response styles is the participant’s tendency to shift answers to agreement rather than to disa-greement regardless of the items’ content. Acquiescence together with other response styles could be a serious threat to the results of research. It can be affected by several individual characteristics including cognitive abilities. We explored the rela-tionship between the ability to solve verbal analogies, age, education, and acquiescence.The sample contained 210 participants, 109 men and 101 women with age ranging from 17 to 70 (M = 45.11, SD = 13.66). The data were collected through an online panel of a research agency. We used Rosenberg’s Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) for estimating acquiescence and 10 tasks for measuring the ability to solve verbal analogies.We found a significant relationship between acquiescence and age with a medium effect and non-significant relationships between acquiescence, the ability to solve verbal analogies, and education.Education seems not to be an adequate variable as a proxy for cognitive variables, and the ability to solve verbal analogies probably does not affect acquiescence in general. However, the existence of a negative relationship between age and acquies-cence is quite surprising, and it could be caused by better developed self-identity of older participants.