Summary The F scale was administered to a sample of 73 undergraduate Arab students at the American University of Beirut, both at the beginning of their freshman year and toward the end of their senior year to assess changes in authoritarianism. In line with previous studies, there was a significant decrease in degree of authoritarianism from freshman to senior. However, two interrelated factors were found to be associated with a greater decrease in authoritarianism: namely, initially moderately high F scores and initially responding in Arabic. The shift from responding in Arabic as a freshman to responding in English as a senior, associated with decrease in authoritarianism, suggested the possibility of either underlying shifts in thinking and ideology in the person as a whole or superficial nonintegrated shifts restricted to the specific “language” through which the subject happens to be responding. The latter possibility raises doubts about the practice sometimes followed in cross-cultural research whereby the requirement of stimulus-equivalence is considered as met through translation-equivalence.