Altruistic Personality Scale

Abstract

The Altruistic Personality Scale (APS), also widely referenced in psychometric literature as the Self-Report Altruism (SRA) Scale, was developed by J. Philippe Rushton, Roland D. Chrisjohn, and G. Cynthia Fekken in 1981. The instrument was constructed to address a central dispute within social psychology: whether prosocial action is governed purely by situational contingencies or is underpinned by a stable, measurable, and enduring individual difference trait known as the altruistic personality. The scale comprises 20 items assessing the behavioral frequency with which an individual engages in specific prosocial acts directed predominantly toward strangers and acquaintances, such as donating blood, giving directions, providing financial charity, or helping a stranded motorist. Responses are recorded on a 5-point Likert-type frequency metric ranging from 1 (Never) to 5 (Very Often), or alternatively 0 (Never) to 4 (Very Often), yielding a continuous global score of trait altruism.

Extensive psychometric investigations have established that the scale demonstrates robust internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging between .78 and .89 across heterogeneous adult and collegiate cohorts) and notable test-retest reliability over extended intervals (coefficients exceeding .80). In factor analytic investigations, the scale consistently yields a prominent primary general factor, supporting the aggregation hypothesis formulated by Seymour Epstein and Rushton, which posits that broad behavioral traits emerge reliably when individual acts are aggregated across occasions and domains. The APS demonstrates well-documented convergent validity with peer ratings of altruism, objective behavioral criteria (e.g., organ donor registrations and actual charitable pledges), empathy measures, and advanced moral reasoning stages, while maintaining discriminant validity against Machiavellianism and generalized response sets. Consequently, the APS remains a foundational benchmark in prosocial psychometrics, behavioral economics, evolutionary psychology, and social-personality research.

Keywords

Altruistic Personality Scale, Self-Report Altruism Scale, prosocial behavior, trait altruism, Rushton, psychometrics, helping behavior, empathy, moral development, behavioral aggregation

Authors

The Altruistic Personality Scale was developed and validated by a research team in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada:

• J. Philippe Rushton, Ph.D., D.Sc. (1943–2012): Formerly Professor of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario, Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Rushton published extensively on prosocial behavior, developmental psychology, and individual differences.
• Roland D. Chrisjohn, Ph.D.: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario; subsequent academic affiliations include the Department of Native Studies at St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada.
• G. Cynthia Fekken, Ph.D.: Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario; subsequently Professor of Psychology and Vice-Principal (Research) at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, specializing in personality assessment, structural equation modeling, and scale construction.

Purpose

The primary objective behind the development of the Altruistic Personality Scale was to empirically resolve the “person versus situation” debate that dominated social psychology throughout the late 1960s and 1970s. Following the seminal field experiments on bystander intervention conducted by Bibb Latané and John Darley, as well as the situationist critique popularized by Walter Mischel in 1968, the prevailing orthodoxy maintained that prosocial acts were almost entirely governed by immediate situational variables (e.g., diffusion of responsibility, time pressure, ambient noise, and the presence of passive confederates). Cross-situational consistency correlations for helping behavior were frequently reported to hover near zero, leading many investigators to declare the concept of an “altruistic personality” a psychometric myth.

Rushton and his colleagues hypothesized that these nominal zero correlations were statistical artifacts resulting from single-item, single-occasion behavioral sampling. Drawing on the principle of behavioral aggregation, they sought to design a psychometrically sound self-report instrument that captured a broad portfolio of altruistic actions performed across diverse social contexts over an extended period. The scale was purposefully formulated to measure:

• Everyday Altruistic Tendencies: The self-reported temporal frequency with which an individual engages in voluntary actions that incur some degree of personal cost (time, physical effort, cognitive investment, financial resources, or social risk) to benefit others, especially unfamiliar individuals.
• Dispositional Prosocial Orientation: The underlying, durable trait variance that differentiates individuals who consistently demonstrate altruistic initiative from those who are passive or avoidant when opportunities to help arise.
• Generalizable Helping Across Distinct Modalities: A composite behavioral index spanning diverse behavioral categories, including emergency physical interventions, monetary and material donations, volunteer services, informational assistance, and interpersonal courtesies.

In applied contexts, the APS is utilized in sociological and organizational research to predict prosocial citizenship behaviors, employee volunteering, community leadership, and healthcare professional dedication. In clinical, forensic, and social psychology, the instrument serves as an objective baseline for examining prosocial deficits, validating interventions designed to foster social responsibility, and investigating the interplay between personality dimensions and cooperative behavior in social dilemmas.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct measured by the Altruistic Personality Scale is trait altruism—defined conceptually as a relatively enduring disposition characterized by voluntary behaviors directed toward enhancing the welfare of others without anticipation of external rewards or reciprocal gains. While the scale was designed and operates effectively as a unidimensional construct of aggregated prosociality, clinical and psychometric examinations reveal several underlying thematic dimensions reflecting how altruistic tendencies manifest in daily human interaction:

1. Tangible and Financial Donations

This dimension reflects an individual’s propensity to part with financial resources or material goods to support charitable causes or alleviate personal hardship experienced by strangers. Specific acts include donating money to formal charitable organizations (Item 4), providing currency directly to needy individuals or panhandlers (Item 5), donating personal possessions and apparel (Item 6), and intentionally purchasing charity greeting cards to fund philanthropic initiatives (Item 15). This facet taps into the willingness to incur direct economic sacrifice for social utility.

2. Somatic and High-Effort Physical Assistance

A second core behavioral manifestation involves somatic investment, physical labor, or direct personal expenditure of bodily resources. The most explicit marker of this dimension is blood donation (Item 8), an act that carries minor physical discomfort and non-monetary physical cost for the sole benefit of an unseen recipient. Similarly, pushing a stranger’s broken-down automobile (Item 1), helping an acquaintance relocate household belongings (Item 20), or carrying heavy luggage and parcels for someone in need (Item 9) represent tangible investments of muscular exertion and somatic effort.

3. Public Interpersonal Help and Informal Courtesies

This category involves active, low-to-moderate cost social behaviors performed in public spaces toward strangers. Examples encompass giving travel directions to lost individuals (Item 2), making change for currency (Item 3), holding elevator doors for approaching passengers (Item 10), allowing someone in a hurry to advance in a checkout queue (Item 11), and relinquishing transit seating on buses or trains to standing individuals (Item 19). These acts reflect acute attentiveness to immediate social environments and an internalized norm of civic cooperation.

4. High-Vulnerability and Communal Support

Certain items on the scale demand elevated levels of interpersonal trust, social risk-taking, or substantial commitments of personal time. Giving a stranger a ride in one’s private vehicle (Item 12), lending personal tools or valuable household items to unfamiliar neighbors (Item 14), voluntarily watching a neighbor’s children or pets without remuneration (Item 17), and offering direct academic tutoring to a struggling peer without compensation (Item 16) require overcoming social skepticism and assuming personal vulnerability for the benefit of another.

5. Moral Integrity and Conscientious Restitution

Item 13 assesses a unique aspect of prosociality: alerting a cashier or bank clerk to an undercharging error. Unlike conventional physical or financial assistance, this behavior captures active moral integrity, where the actor refuses to exploit an asymmetric advantage at an immediate personal loss, reinforcing universal ethical norms of justice and fairness.

Theoretical Framework

The Altruistic Personality Scale is grounded in a synthesis of trait theory, the principle of psychometric aggregation, and evolutionary and developmental models of prosocial behavior.

1. The Aggregation Principle

Historically, social psychological research on helping was plagued by low predictive validity. Seymour Epstein (1979) demonstrated that single instances of behavior correlate poorly with broad traits due to error variance generated by immediate, transient situational variables. However, when multiple behavioral manifestations of a construct are measured and summed across occasions, the situational “noise” averages out, leaving a reliable and stable variance attributable to the person.

Rushton (1980) applied this aggregation logic directly to altruism. The APS operationalizes this framework by presenting 20 distinct, naturally occurring behaviors. Even if an individual fails to help push a stranded vehicle due to a specific physical limitation or urgency, their overarching altruistic disposition will register systematically across the remaining 19 indicators, revealing a coherent latent trait.

2. Evolutionary and Sociobiological Perspectives

From an evolutionary psychology perspective, altruism presents an adaptive puzzle: why would natural selection favor behaviors that diminish personal resources for the benefit of non-relatives? Rushton aligned his psychometric work with evolutionary models developed by W. D. Hamilton (kin selection), Robert Trivers (reciprocal altruism), and subsequent theories of genetic similarity. The presence of stable, hereditary variance in altruistic inclinations suggests that prosocial traits confer adaptive group benefits, social capital, and reputational reciprocity, which have become embedded in human behavioral phenotypes.

3. Social Learning and Moral Reasoning

The developmental framework undergirding the scale borrows from Albert Bandura’s social learning theory and Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development. Rushton posited that repeated exposure to prosocial parental models, internalized social norms of reciprocity and social responsibility, and advanced empathy-inducing socializations gradually crystallize into an internalized personality structure. Individuals operating at post-conventional moral levels act prosocially because their core self-identity is intertwined with universal ethical obligations, leading to habitual acts of altruism that operate largely independent of external social reinforcement.

Validity

The psychometric validation of the Altruistic Personality Scale by Rushton, Chrisjohn, and Fekken (1981), alongside subsequent independent investigations, has established solid empirical support across diverse validation modalities:

1. Construct and Convergent Validity

To confirm that self-reported act frequencies reflect genuine prosocial dispositions rather than mere self-enhancement or response bias, Rushton et al. (1981) conducted comprehensive multi-method validation studies:

• Peer and Informant Ratings: In their foundational study with university students, participants completed the APS while their peers, roommates, or acquaintances completed parallel observer-rating versions assessing the target individual’s altruistic habits. Peer ratings correlated significantly with target self-reports (coefficients typically between r = .35 and r = .56, p < .001), establishing that self-reported scores correspond to observable reputations in real-world contexts.
• Empathy and Perspective Taking: Scores on the APS correlate positively and robustly with measures of emotional empathy (such as the Interpersonal Reactivity Index; Davis, 1983), particularly the Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking subscales (r values typically ranging from .32 to .48).
• Moral Reasoning: Significant positive correlations were documented between the APS and Kohlbergian moral judgment measures (e.g., Rest’s Defining Issues Test), confirming that individuals with elevated trait altruism utilize principled, post-conventional moral frameworks.

2. Criterion and Behavioral Predictive Validity

The scale’s predictive power regarding objective real-world actions has been demonstrated across several behavioral paradigms:

• Laboratory and Field Prosocial Commitments: Higher APS scores reliably predict actual willingness to sign organ donor cards, make on-the-spot monetary contributions from experimental compensation to genuine charities, and volunteer for arduous future psychological experiments without academic credit.
• Blood Donation Registers: Correlational analyses with institutional donation records show that high scorers on the APS exhibit significantly greater lifetime frequencies of voluntary blood donation relative to low scorers.

3. Discriminant Validity

To differentiate the construct from social desirability and self-presentation artifacts, the scale was administered alongside the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale. Correlations between the APS and social desirability indices are consistently modest (typically r = .10 to .20, rarely exceeding the variance threshold of shared methods), demonstrating that the scale is not primarily capturing social approval seeking. Furthermore, the APS correlates negatively with Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and hostile interpersonal orientations, demonstrating clear discriminant boundaries from antisocial personality constructs.

Reliability

The Altruistic Personality Scale exhibits strong reliability parameters across diverse demographic groups and cultural settings:

1. Internal Consistency

In the original validation studies by Rushton et al. (1981), Cronbach’s alpha coefficients were evaluated across multiple independent university student and general community samples:

• Sample 1 (N = 120): α = .89
• Sample 2 (N = 188): α = .86
• Sample 3 (N = 197): α = .84
• Sample 4 (N = 100): α = .78
• Sample 5 (N = 158): α = .88

Subsequent international adaptations, including Chinese, Spanish, Italian, and Turkish translations, have reported internal consistency values predominantly between α = .80 and α = .87, demonstrating that the 20 items possess high item-total correlations (generally ranging from .30 to .65) and measure a coherent psychological construct.

2. Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability assessments have confirmed that individual differences captured by the APS are durable over time. In a retest administration over an interval of 16 weeks, Rushton and colleagues documented a test-retest correlation coefficient of r = .84 (p < .001). Subsequent re-evaluations over intervals ranging from 4 weeks to 6 months have yielded stability coefficients consistently above .80, indicating that scores reflect trait-level behavioral patterns rather than transient mood fluctuations or temporary primes.

Factor Analysis

Extensive exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses have examined the dimensionality of the Altruistic Personality Scale:

1. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the original structural investigation by Rushton, Chrisjohn, and Fekken (1981), principal components analysis (PCA) revealed a clear, prominent first factor prior to rotation. This general factor accounted for a large portion of the total variance (eigenvalue typically exceeding 4.5), with all 20 items loading positively and substantially (loadings mostly ranging between .35 and .68). While secondary and tertiary eigenvalues were observed (often reflecting the modality of help, such as direct physical effort vs. institutional charity), the scree test and the overwhelming magnitude of the first unrotated component provided strong empirical justification for summing all 20 items into a single, global trait score.

2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Modern psychometric re-evaluations utilizing structural equation modeling (SEM) have tested both strictly unidimensional models and correlated multi-factor structures. In studies such as those by Chou (1996) and subsequent cross-cultural researchers:

• Single-Factor Model: The single general factor model demonstrates acceptable fit when residual covariances between conceptually paired items (e.g., donating money to charity vs. donating clothes/goods to charity) are modeled, with fit metrics commonly attaining: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .90, Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .88, and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .06.
• Hierarchical / Bi-Factor Models: A bi-factor model containing one general broad altruism factor alongside specific subordinate grouping factors (e.g., Charity/Giving, Direct Physical Intervention, and Informal Stranger Courtesy) routinely demonstrates superior fit indices (CFI > .94, TLI > .92, RMSEA < .05). However, because the general factor accounts for the vast majority of the reliable common variance (explained common variance [ECV] > .70), researchers continue to endorse the unweighted composite total score as a psychometrically valid representation of an individual’s altruistic personality.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the scale are summarized below:

• Official Instrument Name: Altruistic Personality Scale (APS) / Self-Report Altruism (SRA) Scale
• Original Authors: J. Philippe Rushton, Roland D. Chrisjohn, and G. Cynthia Fekken (1981)
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically ages 16 and older); adaptable for community, student, and organizational populations
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized/online questionnaire
• Estimated Completion Time: 5 to 8 minutes
• Total Item Count: 20 behavioral statements
• Item Content Focus: Specific, concrete prosocial actions directed toward non-kin, acquaintances, or unknown strangers
• Response Format: 5-point Likert-type frequency scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Once
  • 3 = More than once
  • 4 = Often
  • 5 = Very Often
  • (Note: In some research configurations, coding from 0 = Never to 4 = Very Often is utilized; both formats produce identical scale properties)
• Scoring Procedure: All 20 items are keyed in the positive direction; there are no reverse-coded items. The overall score is calculated as a continuous measure by summing responses across all items (potential range: 20 to 100 on the 1–5 scale, or 0 to 80 on the 0–4 scale). Alternatively, a mean item score (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0) can be calculated. Higher aggregate values reflect a greater frequency of engaging in prosocial behavior and higher trait altruism.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Altruistic Personality Scale was originally published in 1981 in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences. Under prevailing academic publishing conventions and standard scientific fair-use guidelines, the scale is in the public domain for non-commercial educational, scientific, and clinical research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is cited.

No licensing fees or formal publisher permissions are required for academic research use. Organizations or corporate commercial assessment developers intending to embed the scale into commercial diagnostic software, consulting tools, or for-profit platforms should verify licensing requirements in accordance with Elsevier’s copyright policies governing original journal contributions.

References

The following scientific literature provides theoretical, historical, and psychometric documentation for the Altruistic Personality Scale:

• Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Prentice-Hall.
• Chou, K. L. (1996). The Rushton, Chrisjohn and Fekken Self-Report Altruism Scale: A study of reliability and validity in Chinese adolescents. Personality and Individual Differences, 21(2), 297–299. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(96)00041-0
• Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8(4), 377–383. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0025589
• Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113
• 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
• Mischel, W. (1968). Personality and assessment. John Wiley & Sons.
• Rushton, J. P. (1980). Altruism, socialization, and society. Prentice-Hall.
• 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