Emler, Renwick, and Malone (1983) argued against a developmental interpretation of the Defining Issues Test (DIT), suggesting instead that it actually measures a social psychological phenomenon--political identification. On the other hand, Sanders, Lubinski, and Benbow (1995) have argued that DIT scores measure intellectual ability. In this study, we pitted the DIT against measures of political identification and intellectual ability in order to test its ability to incrementally predict variation in post-9/11 attitudes. We found that both DIT-2 scores and political identification were significant predictors of attitudes toward restricting human rights/civil liberties, while our index of intellectual ability (i.e. ACT scores) was not. DIT-2 scores, political identification and intellectual ability each accounted for significant variation in attitudes toward President George W. Bush in our undergraduate college sample during the spring of 2004.