Facets of acquiescence: Agreeing with negations is not the same as accepting inconsistency

- Acquiescence has different facets.
- Different facets explain between 1 and 12% of total item variance.
- Acquiescence facets correlate differently with educational attainment.

The present study investigates whether acquiescence is a general, unidimensional response style or whether there are different facets of acquiescence, such as the tendency to agree with any item (agreement), the tendency to accept inconsistent items but not their negations (acceptance), and the tendency to agree with items in a specific domain only. 398 respondents completed 96 personality, attitudinal, and knowledge items. We used structural equation modeling to decompose the variance of the manifest items into different facets of acquiescence. Our results suggest that acquiescence does have different facets: In addition to a general agreement facet, we identified domain-specific agreement and acceptance facets that explain between 1 and 12% of item variance. These acquiescence facets correlate differently with educational attainment.