Altruistic Personality Scale

Abstract

The Altruistic Personality Scale, originally established in the psychometric literature as the Self-Report Altruism Scale (SRA) by J. Philippe Rushton, Roland D. Chrisjohn, and G. Cynthia Fekken (1981), is a 20-item behavioral instrument engineered to quantify individual differences in prosocial behavioral disposition. Designed to address foundational debates regarding cross-situational consistency in moral conduct, the scale operationalizes altruism not merely as an internalized cognitive ideal, but as the reported retrospective frequency of specific helping behaviors enacted primarily toward unfamiliar individuals (strangers), charitable organizations, and casual acquaintances. Respondents evaluate each item using a 5-point frequency continuum ranging from 1 (Never) to 5 (Very Often). Across diverse normative and cross-cultural samples, the scale exhibits robust psychometric parameters, characterized by strong internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging between .78 and .89) and high temporal stability (test-retest correlations exceeding .80 over multi-week intervals). Construct validity is well-established through convergent correlations with peer evaluations, standardized empathy inventories, indices of social responsibility, and behavioral observations of prosocial action, alongside discriminant validity against severe social desirability distortions. Factor analytic examinations substantiate a dominant general factor reflecting a broad, coherent trait of prosociality, confirming the instrument’s utility across clinical, social, evolutionary, and organizational psychological research.

Keywords

Altruistic Personality Scale, Self-Report Altruism Scale, prosocial behavior, altruism, empathy, psychometrics, trait theory, behavioral aggregation, social responsibility, bystander intervention.

Authors

The scale was developed and psychometrically validated by a research team at the Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada:

• J. Philippe Rushton, Ph.D., D.Sc. (1943–2012) — Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario. Principal investigator specializing in human behavioral genetics, evolutionary personality theory, and prosocial behavior.
• Roland D. Chrisjohn, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario; subsequent affiliations include St. Thomas University, Department of Native Studies. Specialist in psychometrics and quantitative methodologies.
• G. Cynthia Fekken, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario; later Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Expert in personality assessment, scale construction, and structured test evaluation.

Purpose

The central purpose of the Altruistic Personality Scale is to measure stable individual differences in human altruistic tendencies through an aggregated index of observable, non-remunerated helping actions. Developed during an era characterized by intense theoretical controversy within personality and social psychology, the instrument served as an empirical rejoinder to extreme situationist paradigms. Throughout the 1970s, influential researchers argued that human helping was dictated almost exclusively by ephemeral contextual cues—such as the number of bystanders present, noise levels, time pressure, or transient mood states—rather than enduring personality structures (see the classic bystander intervention studies by Latané & Darley, 1970).

Rushton and colleagues formulated the SRA to demonstrate that although single instances of altruistic behavior may be heavily moderated by situational variables, aggregating multiple prosocial acts across distinct everyday scenarios reveals a highly stable, underlying individual difference variable. The scale is widely used in both basic research and applied settings. In experimental social psychology, it serves as a baseline covariate to isolate the effects of contextual primes or social engineering interventions on helping rates. In evolutionary and behavioral genetics paradigms, the instrument provides an index of non-kin altruism to evaluate evolutionary theories of reciprocal altruism and group selection. Furthermore, organizational psychologists utilize the scale to examine organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB), interpersonal workplace facilitation, and ethical leadership styles, while volunteer organizations use it to evaluate volunteer retention and altruistic engagement.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by this instrument is the altruistic personality, defined operationally as a persistent, trans-situational behavioral disposition to perform actions that benefit others at some immediate cost, expenditure of effort, or inconvenience to the self, without anticipation of tangible external remuneration. In psychological taxonomy, altruism represents the behavioral manifestation of broad prosociality, located at the conceptual intersection of high Agreeableness, high Honesty-Humility (within the HEXACO framework), advanced moral reasoning, and dispositional empathy.

The construct encompasses several behavioral sub-facets unified under a singular higher-order trait:

• Everyday Spontaneous Assistance toward Strangers: Low-to-moderate-cost behavioral interventions in public environments, such as offering directions, carrying heavy parcels, holding elevator doors, or relinquishing a seat on public transit. These acts require spontaneous attentiveness to another individual’s immediate physical predicament.
• Emergency and High-Effort Physical Assistance: Demanding interventions that entail substantial energetic expenditure, risk, or acute mechanical action, such as assisting a motorist in pushing a stalled vehicle or helping someone move households.
• Institutional and Philanthropic Giving: Institutionalized prosocial commitments that involve transferring financial or physical assets to established welfare entities, such as blood donation, philanthropic cash contributions, donating apparel, and formal volunteer labor.
• Civil and Interpersonal Integrity: Moral actions that demand honesty against self-interest, such as correcting a cashier’s undercharging error, or extending trust by loaning valuable tools to casual acquaintances.

Rather than measuring hypothetical intentions or affective states (e.g., asking “How deeply do you feel for someone in distress?”), the construct is strictly grounded in retrospective behavioral frequency. This approach circumvents the affective-behavioral disconnect frequently observed in self-report research, where individuals endorse strong empathetic concern yet fail to engage in actual helpful action.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Altruistic Personality Scale relies primarily on the Principle of Aggregation, championed by Seymour Epstein (1979) and extended to prosocial behavior by Rushton, Chrisjohn, and Fekken (1981). This psychometric framework asserts that measuring broad personality traits requires sampling multiple instances of behavior across various domains. While any single prosocial act exhibits low predictability due to situational variance (e.g., traffic conditions, immediate urgency, presence of other witnesses), aggregating multiple behavioral observations cancels out situation-specific error variance, revealing a reliable behavioral core.

The scale is informed by several complementary psychological theories:

• Social Learning Theory and Cognitive Development: Proponents such as Albert Bandura and Nancy Eisenberg conceptualize prosocial behavior as the product of internalized behavioral repertoires acquired via observational learning, modeling, reinforcement history, and developmental shifts from hedonistic orientation to internalized moral principles.
• The Empathy-Altruism Hypothesis: Formulated by C. Daniel Batson, this model posits that other-oriented empathic concern motivates genuine altruism directed exclusively toward alleviating the distress of the recipient. The Altruistic Personality Scale captures individuals who consistently translate empathic concern into concrete interventions across diverse situations.
• Evolutionary Perspectives on Reciprocal and Non-Kin Altruism: Grounded in the evolutionary paradigms of Robert Trivers (1971), non-kin altruism flourishes when the net long-term advantages of generalized social reciprocity outweigh the immediate energetic costs to the donor. The scale emphasizes actions directed primarily toward strangers and non-relatives, capturing altruistic variance unconfounded by kin selection.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations have established the construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity of the Altruistic Personality Scale across diverse demographic and international cohorts.

Convergent Validity

In the original validation studies conducted by Rushton et al. (1981), the scale demonstrated robust convergence with multi-source assessments. Self-reported scores on the SRA correlated significantly with:

• Peer Ratings of Altruism: SRA scores correlated moderately to strongly with peer ratings completed by close friends and acquaintances (coefficients typically ranging from r = .35 to .56, p < .001), showing that self-reported scores reflect verifiable, observable behaviors visible to external observers.
• Standardized Empathy Measures: Positive correlations were documented with Mehrabian and Epstein’s Measure of Emotional Empathy (r = .38 to .45), confirming that affective sensitivity to others’ distress underpins higher scores on the scale.
• Social Responsibility: The instrument demonstrated meaningful correlations with the Gough Social Responsibility Scale (r = .36 to .48), establishing that the self-reported frequency of altruistic acts relates to internalized civil duty and moral commitment.
• Moral Reasoning: The SRA correlated positively with higher stages of moral judgment on Rest’s Defining Issues Test (DIT), verifying that advanced sociomoral cognitive operations parallel increased frequencies of practical prosocial action.

Discriminant Validity

To establish that the SRA does not merely measure social desirability bias, Rushton et al. (1981) administered the inventory alongside the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Correlations between the SRA and the Marlowe-Crowne scale were consistently non-significant or negligible (r values typically between -.05 and .14). Furthermore, the scale correlated negatively with Machiavellianism (r = -.32 to -.44), illustrating that individuals scoring high in cynicism, opportunistic manipulation, and interpersonal exploitation score low on the instrument.

Criterion-Related and Behavioral Validity

Behavioral criterion studies have shown that high scorers on the SRA are significantly more likely to sign organ donor cards, make on-the-spot contributions to university charity drives, participate in blood drives, and volunteer to assist disabled students in real-world settings. These criterion-related findings confirm that self-reported behavioral frequency serves as an accurate proxy for objective prosocial conduct.

Reliability

The scale possesses stable internal consistency and temporal reliability across various populations:

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation series involving multiple university samples (N > 400), Rushton et al. (1981) reported Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging between .78 and .87 across samples. Subsequent validations in community samples, high school groups, and international cohorts have regularly confirmed alpha coefficients between .80 and .89.
• Test-Retest Stability: Evaluation over intervals spanning three to twelve weeks demonstrated temporal stability, with test-retest correlation coefficients consistently documented between r = .80 and r = .89, demonstrating that the scale assesses a stable behavioral trait rather than fluctuating state moods.
• Cross-Cultural Reliability: Translations and adaptations in Spanish, Turkish, Persian, German, and Chinese have observed comparable internal consistencies (alphas generally exceeding .75), demonstrating cross-linguistic and cross-cultural reliability.

Factor Analysis

The latent structural properties of the Altruistic Personality Scale have been examined via Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA):

Exploratory Factor Analysis

In original principal components analyses conducted by Rushton et al. (1981), an examination of the scree plot revealed a prominent first unrotated factor accounting for a large proportion of common variance, with item loadings ranging from .35 to .72. Items measuring direct stranger assistance (e.g., Item 1: pushing a stranded car; Item 9: carrying parcels; Item 2: giving directions) and organized contributions (Item 4: donating money; Item 6: donating goods) loaded heavily on this primary dimension.

Multidimensional Models

Subsequent psychometric evaluations across larger community and cross-cultural datasets have occasionally extracted multi-factor solutions when applying oblique (Promax) or orthogonal (Varimax) rotations. These analyses typically resolve the 20 items into three or four correlated sub-dimensions:

1. Spontaneous Assistance / Emergency Aid (Direct Stranger Helping): Characterized by items such as pushing a car, giving a ride to a stranger, or carrying heavy belongings.
2. Civic and Charitable Philanthropy: Capturing institutionalized donation of money, clothing, and blood, as well as formal volunteer activities.
3. Interpersonal Courtesy and Accommodation: Encompassing everyday public etiquette, such as yielding a place in line, holding elevator doors, or offering transit seating.

Despite these lower-order distinctions, modern CFA investigations usually demonstrate that a bifactor model—comprising a dominant general altruism factor alongside narrow specific facets—exhibits acceptable model fit indices (e.g., CFI > .92, TLI > .90, RMSEA < .06), supporting the practice of calculating a single global continuous index of altruistic behavior.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report behavioral frequency inventory.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically aged 16 and older).
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil, computer-administered, or mobile survey platform; individual or group testing.
• Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes.
• Number of Items: 20 items.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert-type frequency scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Once
  • 3 = More than once
  • 4 = Often
  • 5 = Very Often
• Scoring Protocol: All 20 items are keyed in a positive direction (there are no reverse-coded items). Individual responses are summed to create a total composite score ranging from 20 to 100, or averaged to yield a continuous mean score between 1.00 and 5.00. Higher values represent a higher dispositional frequency of prosocial engagement. (Note: In some variations of the SRA, options are indexed 0 to 4, yielding a total score range from 0 to 80; researchers should verify the indexing parameters utilized in their specific administration).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Self-Report Altruism Scale (Altruistic Personality Scale) was published in 1981 in the Personality and Individual Differences journal. As an academic assessment designed for educational, scientific, and psychometric evaluation, the instrument is in the public domain for academic research purposes. No licensing fees, commercial royalties, or formal administrative clearances are required for non-commercial scholarly research, provided that appropriate bibliographic attribution is extended to the original authors (Rushton, Chrisjohn, & Fekken, 1981). Commercial entities, corporate talent assessment platforms, and proprietary testing systems should consult the journal copyright holder (Elsevier) regarding formal permissions for commercial use.

References

• Batson, C. D. (1991). The Altruism Question: Toward a Social-Psychological Answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Eisenberg, N., & Fabes, R. A. (1998). Prosocial development. In W. Damon & N. Eisenberg (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology: Vol. 3. Social, Emotional, and Personality Development (5th ed., pp. 701–778). John Wiley & Sons.
• Epstein, S. (1979). The stability of behavior: I. On predicting most of the people much of the time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37(7), 1097–1126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.7.1097
• Latané, B., & Darley, J. M. (1970). The Unresponsive Bystander: Why Doesn’t He Help? Appleton-Century-Crofts.
• Mehrabian, A., & Epstein, N. (1972). A measure of emotional empathy. Journal of Personality, 40(4), 525–543. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1972.tb00078.x
• Rushton, J. P., Chrisjohn, R. D., & Fekken, G. C. (1981). The altruistic personality and the self-report altruism scale. Personality and Individual Differences, 2(4), 293–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(81)90084-2
• Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35–57. https://doi.org/10.1086/406755

Items of the Scale