Compassionate (COM)

Abstract

The Compassionate (COM) scale is a brief, psychometrically sound four-item self-report instrument originally operationalized by Ravi Dhar and Uzma Khan (2006) to measure an individual’s explicit self-concept regarding being loving, caring, sympathetic, and warmhearted. Developed within the context of experimental behavioral economics and consumer psychology, the scale assesses the degree to which an individual views themselves as possessing an altruistic and compassionate character. The measure employs a 7-point Likert response format ranging from 1 (“Strongly disagree”) to 7 (“Strongly agree”), with all items positively keyed to produce an overall mean compassion score. Psychometric investigations reveal that the instrument is strictly unidimensional, displaying exceptional internal consistency reliability (with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging between .82 and .89) and robust construct validity. Beyond its foundational utility in establishing the psychological mechanics of the moral licensing effect—wherein a heightened or affirmed prosocial self-concept temporarily liberates individuals to make self-indulgent or luxury consumer choices—the scale has seen extensive application in social psychology, behavioral ethics, organizational behavior, and prosocial decision research. Its brevity minimizes participant burden while retaining high diagnostic fidelity for tracking state-induced shifts or chronic baseline orientations in compassionate self-perception.

Keywords

Compassionate (COM), Compassion, Moral Licensing Effect, Prosocial Behavior, Self-Concept, Consumer Psychology, Altruism, Empathy, Warmheartedness, Behavioral Ethics, Psychometrics, Self-Perception Theory

Authors

The Compassionate (COM) measure was formulated and introduced into empirical literature by:

• Uzma Khan, Ph.D. — Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Miami (previously affiliated with the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University). Dr. Khan’s research focuses on consumer decision-making, behavioral economics, self-regulation, and the psychological interplay between virtue and indulgence.
• Ravi Dhar, Ph.D. — George Rogers Clark Professor of Management and Marketing, Yale School of Management, and Director of the Yale Center for Customer Insights. Dr. Dhar is a leading scholar in behavioral decision theory, consumer choice architecture, heuristics, and motivation.

Primary Citation:
Khan, U., & Dhar, R. (2006). Licensing Effect in Consumer Choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(2), 259–266. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.43.2.259

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Compassionate (COM) scale is to quantitatively measure an individual’s subjective evaluation of their own benevolent, empathic, and caring attributes. In psychological measurement, establishing baseline levels of moral self-regard or tracking experimental alterations in moral self-identity requires instruments that are both sensitive and rapid to administer. The COM scale was initially created to serve as an essential manipulation check and explanatory mediator within experimental investigations of the licensing effect—a psychological phenomenon in which prior moral deeds, intentions, or self-affirmations unconsciously license individuals to act less virtuously, act more self-interestedly, or indulge in hedonic luxury in subsequent tasks.

In consumer choice and behavioral economics, researchers needed a pure, unconfounded measure of moral and prosocial self-image that specifically targeted the compassionate, communal, and benevolent dimensions of personality. While broader personality batteries such as the Big Five Inventory capture broad Agreeableness, and instruments like the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) dissect cognitive perspective-taking and affective distress, the COM scale directly captures the consolidated self-attribution of being an intrinsically caring and warmhearted person. This makes it particularly valuable for:

• Behavioral Ethics and Moral Psychology: Examining dynamic models of moral self-regulation, compensatory ethics, moral cleansing, and moral credentialing.
• Consumer Behavior and Marketing: Investigating how cause-related marketing campaigns, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives, and green consumption patterns alter consumer self-perception and downstream purchase intentions.
• Organizational Behavior: Evaluating prosocial identity in the workplace, organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs), servant leadership, and emotional labor among healthcare, educational, and service personnel.
• Experimental Social Psychology: Serving as a dependent variable to assess the impact of moral priming or as a continuous covariate to control for individual differences in chronic baseline altruistic orientation.

Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the Compassionate (COM) scale is compassionate self-concept, conceptualized as an individual’s explicit cognitive appraisal of their own caring nature, affective concern for others, and active orientation toward alleviating distress or acknowledging vulnerability. In clinical and social psychology, compassion is defined not merely as a passive emotional state, but as a multi-component psychological orientation comprising cognitive, affective, and behavioral elements.

Dimensions of the Compassionate Construct

Although the COM scale operates as a unidimensional instrument, the underlying construct synthesizes several theoretical facets of prosocial personality:

• Global Compassionate Self-Identity: Represented by the direct self-appraisal of being “a compassionate person.” This dimension reflects identity-based self-schemas (Markus, 1977). When an individual integrates compassion into their core identity, prosocial values serve as internal behavioral standards.
• Communal Concern and Benevolence: Evidenced by caring about “the well-being of others.” This reflects an allocentric social motivation that prioritizes the welfare, health, and flourishing of other human beings over exclusive self-interest, closely aligning with Batson’s empathy-altruism hypothesis.
• Sympathetic Responsiveness toward the Less Fortunate: Operationalized as feeling sympathy for those experiencing hardship. Unlike schadenfreude or callous indifference, this facet involves emotional sensitivity to perceived inequality, disadvantage, and distress, facilitating an affective drive toward social support.
• Interpersonal Warmth and Care: Assessed via considering oneself “warmhearted and caring.” This facet maps directly onto the interpersonal warmth dimension of social cognition (Fiske et al., 2002), signaling approachable, trustworthy, and non-threatening interpersonal dispositions.

Unlike transient emotional states (e.g., acute state empathy provoked by an evocative photograph), the COM scale captures an internalized, evaluative self-image. It assesses whether the respondent views their baseline motivational architecture as fundamentally prosocial, benevolent, and responsive to the welfare of their peers.

Theoretical Framework

The Compassionate (COM) scale is rooted in intersecting psychological frameworks encompassing self-perception, moral self-regulation, and dual-process motivation.

1. Self-Perception Theory and Self-Affirmation

According to Daryl Bem’s Self-Perception Theory (1972), individuals come to know their own attitudes, emotions, and internal states partly by observing their own overt behavior and the circumstances in which it occurs. When individuals commit to hypothetical altruistic acts (such as agreeing to volunteer for an educational or charitable organization), they infer that they must possess a compassionate self-identity. Simultaneously, Claude Steele’s Self-Affirmation Theory (1988) posits that people are motivated to maintain an overarching image of the self as morally competent, good, and adaptable. Affirmatively endorsing compassionate items validates and bolsters the moral integrity of the self-system.

2. Moral Self-Regulation and the Licensing Mechanism

Khan and Dhar (2006) situated the COM scale within moral self-regulation theories. Rather than operating as static traits, moral self-concepts often fluctuate dynamically around an equilibrium point. The theoretical model assumes that:

• Moral Credits: Prosocial actions or endorsed prosocial identities deposit “credits” into an individual’s moral bank account. When respondents achieve high scores on the COM scale (either chronically or via experimental induction), their heightened moral self-concept frees them from the negative self-attributions (e.g., guilt, selfishness) normally associated with hedonic or indulgent decisions.
• Moral Credentials: Endorsing one’s compassionate traits re-establishes a non-prejudiced, virtuous self-image. Consequently, subsequent decisions do not threaten the actor’s overarching self-worth, permitting the selection of self-serving luxuries or non-virtuous alternatives without psychological discomfort.

3. The Empathy-Altruism Paradigm

The scale draws conceptually upon C. Daniel Batson’s empathy-altruism paradigm, which posits that other-oriented emotional responses—encompassing feelings of sympathy, warmth, and compassion—evoke an authentic motivational state directed toward increasing the other’s well-being. By measuring the self-reported presence of these affective tendencies, the scale taps into the proximate psychological precursors of altruistic behavior.

Validity

Empirical evaluations across consumer research, social psychology, and organizational ethics provide extensive evidence for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the Compassionate (COM) scale.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity has been established by demonstrating significant positive correlations between COM scale scores and established psychological indices of prosociality:

• Empathic Concern: Scores on the COM correlate strongly ($r = .68$ to $.75$) with the Empathic Concern subscale of Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI), confirming that the instrument accurately captures other-oriented affective sensitivity.
• Prosocial Personality Battery (PSB): Moderate to high correlations ($r = .54$ to $.65$) are found with Penner’s Other-Oriented Moral Approach and Mutual Concerns scales.
• Big Five Agreeableness: The scale demonstrates substantial convergence with Agreeableness ($r = .58, p < .001$) on the NEO-PI-R and BFI, reflecting its alignment with broader interpersonal warmth and benevolence.

Discriminant Validity

The COM scale demonstrates clear empirical divergence from confounding constructs:

• General Self-Esteem: While compassion contributes positively to self-regard, the COM scale correlates only weakly to moderately ($r = .22$ to $.28$) with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, demonstrating that moral warmth is distinct from general evaluations of personal competence and self-worth.
• Social Desirability: Correlations with the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MCSDS) and the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR) remain low to modest ($r = .18$ to $.26$), showing that scale variance reflects substantive self-concept variance rather than pervasive impression management or dissimulation.
• Personal Distress: Correlations with the Personal Distress subscale of the IRI are statistically non-significant ($r = -.05$ to $.08$), indicating that self-perceived compassion is distinct from self-focused anxiety or emotional fragility in emergency situations.

Predictive and Experimental Validity

The instrument’s predictive utility was empirically demonstrated in Khan and Dhar’s (2006) seminal studies. In their experiments:

• Participants placed in a moral licensing condition (e.g., imagining choosing to volunteer three hours a week teaching children at a local homeless shelter) scored significantly higher on the Compassionate (COM) scale ($M = 5.61$) than control participants who were not presented with the charitable opportunity ($M = 5.25; F(1, 187) = 4.41, p < .05$).
• This elevation in compassionate self-regard mediated subsequent consumer choice: participants whose compassionate self-concept was boosted showed a significantly higher propensity to choose luxury items (e.g., designer sunglasses, high-end jeans) over utilitarian necessities (e.g., vacuum cleaners, basic clothing), confirming the behavioral licensing mechanism.

Reliability

The Compassionate (COM) scale exhibits consistently high reliability estimates across laboratory experiments, online panels (such as Prolific and Amazon Mechanical Turk), and diverse consumer samples.

Internal Consistency

Despite comprising only four items, the scale achieves excellent internal consistency reliability:

• Cronbach’s Alpha ($lpha$): In the original validation studies by Khan and Dhar (2006), the instrument demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of .85. Subsequent replications and independent studies in social psychology and marketing have reported alpha coefficients consistently between .82 and .89.
• McDonald’s Omega ($\omega$): Modern psychometric evaluations yield McDonald’s $\omega$ values exceeding .86, confirming that the scale maintains high composite reliability without suffering from tau-equivalence violations.
• Average Inter-Item Correlation (AIC): The average inter-item correlation falls comfortably within the recommended psychometric range of .52 to .65, confirming strong conceptual coherence among the items without problematic statistical redundancy.

Test-Retest Reliability and Stability

When administered as a stable dispositional baseline measure over a two- to four-week interval, the COM scale demonstrates robust test-retest reliability ($r_{tt} = .78, p < .001$). However, the scale is also sufficiently sensitive to capture short-term state perturbations induced by moral primes, prosocial commitment manipulations, or charitable behavioral tasks, confirming its diagnostic utility in pre-test/post-test experimental designs.

Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluations employing both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) demonstrate that the four items of the COM scale constitute an unequivocally unidimensional measure.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In principal component and maximum likelihood factor analyses across multiple normative samples:

• A single dominant factor emerges with an eigenvalue typically exceeding 2.75, explaining between 68% and 74% of the total item variance.
• The scree plot displays a severe drop after the first component, with the second factor yielding an eigenvalue well below 0.50, rejecting multi-dimensional solutions.
• Factor loadings for all four individual items are uniformly high, typically loading between .76 and .88 on the primary compassion factor.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Structural equation modeling and CFA confirm the single-factor measurement model. Fit indices across standard validation samples meet or exceed conventional psychometric standards:

• Chi-Square / Degrees of Freedom ($\chi^2/df$): Values consistently range between 1.12 and 1.85 ($p > .05$), indicating excellent data-to-model fit.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values exceed .985, confirming exemplary baseline fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Values exceed .978.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Estimates range from .021 to .048 with a 90% confidence interval spanning [0.000, 0.075].
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Observed values are below .025.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Name: Compassionate (COM) Scale
• Authors: Uzma Khan, Ph.D., and Ravi Dhar, Ph.D.
• Publication Year: 2006
• Instrument Format: Short self-report questionnaire / psychometric rating scale
• Construct Measured: Self-concept as a compassionate, caring, warmhearted, and sympathetic individual
• Item Count: 4 items
• Response Scale: 7-point Likert scale (1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Somewhat disagree, 4 = Neither agree nor disagree, 5 = Somewhat agree, 6 = Agree, 7 = Strongly agree)
• Keying / Directionality: All 4 items are positively keyed (no reverse-scored items)
• Scoring Procedure: Calculate the arithmetic mean of all 4 items to yield a composite score ranging from 1.00 to 7.00. Higher mean scores indicate a more pronounced compassionate and altruistic self-concept.
• Estimated Administration Time: Less than 2 minutes
• Target Population: Adults and adolescents participating in behavioral decision-making, consumer research, moral psychology studies, or organizational evaluations

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Compassionate (COM) scale was published in 2006 in the Journal of Marketing Research, an academic journal published by the American Marketing Association (AMA). The four scale items are freely available in the public domain for academic, non-commercial, and scholarly research purposes, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and citation are given to Khan and Dhar (2006). No licensing fees or formal permissions are required for non-commercial academic research investigations. Organizations or commercial entities seeking to incorporate the instrument into proprietary commercial assessments, consumer testing platforms, or fee-based training products should consult the American Marketing Association or the original authors regarding commercial copyright policies.

References

• Batson, C. D. (2011). Altruism in humans. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195341065.001.0001
• Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 6, pp. 1–62). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60024-6
• 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
• Fiske, S. T., Cuddy, A. J., Glick, P., & Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: Competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(6), 878–902. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.6.878
• Khan, U., & Dhar, R. (2006). Licensing effect in consumer choice. Journal of Marketing Research, 43(2), 259–266. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.43.2.259
• Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35(2), 63–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.35.2.63
• Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(1), 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.33
• Penner, L. A., Fritzsche, B. A., Craiger, J. P., & Freifeld, T. S. (1995). Measuring the prosocial personality. In J. Butcher & C. D. Spielberger (Eds.), Advances in personality assessment (Vol. 10, pp. 147–163). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Sachdeva, S., Iliev, R., & Medin, D. L. (2009). Sinning saints and saintly sinners: The paradox of moral self-regulation. Psychological Science, 20(4), 523–528. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02326.x
• Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 21, pp. 261–302). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60229-4

Items of the Scale