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This article looks at three measuring instruments—the Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale, the Social Dominance Orientation Scale, and the Attitudes About Reality Scale—used to examine covert ideology and its relationship to social and political beliefs and behaviors. These scales share similar ideological components involving abdication of moral responsibility to an outside agent, belief that one's own ideology represents the only form of truth, and negative beliefs about individuals who are not members of one's own group. Evidence is provided to suggest that radical fundamentalists and some groups within U.S. society share ideological beliefs that differ in degree rather than kind. These beliefs make it easy for them to divide the world into "us" and "them" and exacerbate the present conflict.

Scholarship about women and gender in the US is marked by controversies about sex differences; and there is little rapprochement between groups of researchers with different epistemological assumptions. It is argued that empirical investigation of personal epistemology has important implications for feminist scholarship. Following findings of no reliable sex differences in personal epistemology, cross-cultural research showed important interactions between sex and religiosity. This suggests that in order to be able to make statements about the relative importance of sex/gender in predicting behavior, feminist researchers need to subject a wider range of variables to multiple comparisons.