Activities

As part of our screening of participants, and throughout the study participants completed psychometric tests designed to assess their attitudes and mental states.

Three things in which we were particularly interested were authoritarianism, depression and stress.

We were interested in authoritarianism because this is a personality style that has been linked to support for tyranny and prejudice. We were interested in well-being for two reasons. First, because we wanted to select for the study only well-adjusted participants who were not at risk of harm. Second, because we wanted to see whether and how participants’ mental health would change as the study progressed.

These assessments were based on participants' completion of a battery of self-report measures. This involved responding to a series of questions or statements on relevant rating scales.