A new method of detecting and controlling for acquiescence response biases in questionnaire studies was developed and applied to a cross-national survey data on trust collected by Yamagishi & Yamagishi (1994). Instead of including a set of balanced items or a large number of mutually unrelated questions as was common in conventional methods for assessing acquiesence, the proposed method uses multiple, mutually independent sets of items selected based on a principal component analysis. A relatively high correlation (r=.56) between two independent indices of acquiescence (obtained from two independent sets of items) suggests validity of the proposed method. No statistically significant differences in acquiescence were found between American and Japanese respondents suggesting that the results of Yamagishi & Yamagishi's results were not due to crossnational differences in acquiescence responses.
