Identification with All Humanity Scale (IWAHS)

Abstract

The Identification with All Humanity Scale (IWAHS) is a premier psychometric instrument developed by Sam McFarland, Derek Brown, and Matthew Webb to assess the degree to which individuals feel psychological kinship, moral concern, and social belonging with the global human collective. Distinct from standard measures of local or national patriotism, the IWAHS systematically contrasts attachment to one’s immediate community, one’s country (e.g., Americans), and the global collective of all human beings. Composed of 9 stem items evaluated across three distinct comparative targets—yielding 27 total ratings—the instrument operationalizes emotional closeness, self-categorization (use of the collective pronoun “we”), perceived commonality, family-like bond, emotional identification, empathic concern during humanitarian crises, global citizenship aspirations, loyalty, and willingness to provide humanitarian aid. Measured along standardized five-point Likert scales with tailored response anchors across item stems, the instrument demonstrates exemplary psychometric properties. Across international samples, the Identification with All Humanity (IWAH) dimension exhibits high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging from .86 to .93), robust test-retest stability, and distinct construct validity. Confirmatory factor analytic investigations consistently support a three-factor oblique or bifactor structural representation, delineating global identification from local and national identifications. Crucially, IWAHS serves as an indispensable predictive metric in social, political, and cross-cultural psychology, demonstrating substantial predictive validity for support for universal human rights, global humanitarian assistance, international environmental agreements, and resistance to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and militaristic foreign policies.

Keywords

Identification with All Humanity, IWAHS, global identity, cosmopolitanism, social identity theory, pro-social behavior, human rights orientation, ethnocentrism, psychometrics, universalism

Authors

The Identification with All Humanity Scale was originated and developed by Sam McFarland, Ph.D., alongside Derek Brown and Matthew Webb within the Department of Psychology at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA. Dr. Sam McFarland, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, has devoted decades of empirical scholarship to investigating the psychological antecedents of human rights advocacy, prejudice reduction, authoritarianism, and global social responsibility. Derek Brown and Matthew Webb contributed substantially to the early empirical conceptualization, item development, and psychometric validation of the scale across successive community and collegiate research programs.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Identification with All Humanity Scale is to quantitatively capture an expansive level of social identification that transcends geocentrism, ethnocentrism, and national boundary lines. Historically, psychological literature possessed robust paradigms for assessing ingroup favoritism, national attachment, patriotism, and outgroup derogation (e.g., via Right-Wing Authoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation). However, quantitative paradigms lacked a refined, psychometrically validated scale capable of measuring the genuine psychological sense of belonging to humankind as a superordinate collective.

The theoretical rationale behind the IWAHS addresses the need to isolate universal human identification from simple local affiliation or nationalistic pride. By presenting identical psychological dimensions across three nested ecological levels—one’s local community, one’s nation, and humanity as a whole—the instrument allows researchers to disconfirm whether global concern is merely an artifact of general sociability or a unique, superordinate social identification. In academic research, the instrument is employed to investigate the psychological underpinnings of peace, global solidarity, cross-cultural empathy, and commitment to international justice. In political science and macro-level sociology, the scale is utilized to analyze public policy preferences regarding international foreign aid, acceptance of refugees, climate change treaties, and adherence to international humanitarian law. In educational and intervention settings, the scale serves as a benchmark metric to evaluate the effectiveness of global citizenship curricula, international human rights education programs, and intergroup contact interventions designed to reduce intergroup hostility.

Psychological Construct

The core construct measured by the IWAHS is Identification with All Humanity (IWAH), defined as a deep, affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientation toward seeing oneself as an integral part of the worldwide human community. McFarland, Webb, and Brown conceptualized this construct not as abstract idealism or dispassionate cosmopolitan philosophy, but as an active, multidimensional social identity. Within the architecture of the IWAHS, this superordinate identification is evaluated alongside two comparative targets:

• Community Identification: The degree of emotional closeness, perceived commonality, solidarity, and civic duty felt toward people within one’s immediate geographical neighborhood or local township.
• National Identification: The degree of attachment, shared belonging, civic responsibility, and loyalty felt toward individuals sharing one’s national citizenship (e.g., Americans, or substituted national identities in adapted versions).
• Identification with All Humanity (Global Identification): The superordinate level of psychological inclusion where the boundaries of the ingroup are expanded to encompass all human beings across the globe, irrespective of nationality, ethnicity, religion, or cultural differences.

The psychological construct encompasses several foundational facets operationalized across the 9 stem items:

• Subjective Closeness and Belonging: The emotional proximity one feels toward the collective (Stem 1).
• Cognitive Self-Categorization: The spontaneous linguistic and psychological inclusion of the collective within the self-concept, evidenced by using the first-person plural pronoun “we” (Stem 2).
• Perceived Commonality: The recognition of fundamental shared experiences, values, vulnerabilities, and aspirations with members of the target group (Stem 3).
• Kinship Extension / Ingroup Inclusiveness: The psychological framing of unrelated individuals as extended “family” (Stem 4).
• Affective Identification and Love: Deep emotional investment, care, and affectionate concern for the welfare of the collective (Stem 5).
• Global Empathy / Shared Suffering: Vicarious emotional distress and the motivation to assist when harm or catastrophe befalls group members anywhere on Earth (Stem 6).
• Civic Responsibility: The normative aspiration to act as an ethical, active, and accountable citizen of the collective (Stem 7).
• Moral Loyalty: Commitment to protecting the interests, dignity, and integrity of the group (Stem 8).
• Prosocial / Humanitarian Action Tendency: The behavioral imperative to render tangible aid and support to group members experiencing destitution, disaster, or deprivation (Stem 9).

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the IWAHS draws upon and synthesizes three major traditions within psychological science:

1. Self-Categorization and Social Identity Theory

Drawing on Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Self-Categorization Theory (Turner et al., 1987), human identity operates across hierarchical levels of abstraction. Turner postulated three primary levels of self-categorization: the subordinate personal self (individual uniqueness), the intermediate social self (intragroup categorizations such as nationality, ethnicity, or gender), and the superordinate human self (categorization of self as a human being contrasting with other forms of life). Historically, social identity theorists assumed that superordinate categorizations were cognitively unstable, too abstract, or functionally secondary compared to salient national or ethnic identities. McFarland and colleagues overturned this assumption, establishing that the superordinate human categorization can exist as a stable, individual-differences trait characterized by rich emotional, moral, and behavioral components.

2. Humanistic Psychology and Gemeinschaftsgefühl

The concept of identifying with all humanity directly operationalizes Alfred Adler’s foundational construct of Gemeinschaftsgefühl (social interest, or feeling of community), which Adler characterized as a profound sense of oneness with all living humanity. Similarly, Abraham Maslow posited that self-actualizing individuals possess a genuine desire to help the human race, exhibiting deep feelings of identification, sympathy, and affection for mankind as if all people were members of a single family. The IWAHS operationalizes these long-standing humanistic insights into a psychometrically rigorous, empirical instrument.

3. Universalism and the Moral Circle

In the framework of Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, Universalism represents the motivational goal of understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. Identification with all humanity represents an advanced expansion of the moral circle (as conceptualized by Peter Singer). When an individual identifies with humanity, moral boundaries expand beyond the proximate tribe or nation-state, minimizing psychological distance and nullifying the “us versus them” dichotomy that traditionally fuels dehumanization, ethnocentrism, and outgroup derogation.

Validity

Extensive psychometric investigations across diverse international, collegiate, and representative community cohorts provide compelling evidence for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the IWAHS.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Convergent validity is demonstrated by robust, theoretically coherent correlations with established social-psychological and dispositional constructs. Scores on the IWAH subscale correlate significantly and positively with:

• Empathic Concern and Perspective Taking: Strong positive associations with Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI; r values typically ranging between .35 and .55), demonstrating that identifying with humanity is grounded in dispositional affective empathy.
• Universal Human Rights Orientation: High positive correlations with attitudes supporting universal human rights (r > .50) and moral universalism.
• Principled Moral Reasoning: Positive relationships with Kohlbergian post-conventional moral reasoning and high scores on the Defining Issues Test (DIT-2).
• Openness to Experience and Agreeableness: Within the Five-Factor Model of personality, IWAH correlates positively with Openness to Experience (r ≈ .25 to .40) and Agreeableness (r ≈ .30 to .45), reflecting intellectual curiosity, tolerance, and prosocial orientation.

Discriminant Validity

Crucially, IWAH demonstrates distinct discriminant validity from simple community or national identification. When community and national identification are statistically controlled, IWAH continues to uniquely predict outcomes, confirming that it is not merely an epiphenomenon of high sociability or general patriotism. Furthermore, IWAH exhibits moderate to strong negative correlations with constructs assessing group-based dominance and prejudice:

• Social Dominance Orientation (SDO): Consistently negative correlations (r ranging from −.30 to −.52), indicating that individuals high in IWAH reject intergroup hierarchies and the subjugation of subordinate groups.
• Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA): Significant negative correlations (r ranging from −.20 to −.40), reflecting diminished ethnocentric conventionalism and submission to aggressive ingroup authorities.
• Ethnocentrism and Xenophobia: Robust inverse relationships with generalized prejudice, anti-immigrant sentiment, Islamophobia, and racial animus.

Predictive and Ecological Validity

The IWAHS possesses substantial predictive validity across behavioral and policy domains. In empirical investigations, individuals scoring high on IWAH:

• Allocate substantially greater personal monetary donations to international humanitarian relief charities (e.g., UNICEF, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders) relative to domestic-only charities.
• Demonstrate greater active concern for global threats, including global poverty, war atrocities, and planetary climate change.
• Express strong opposition to aggressive, unilateral foreign military interventions and state-sanctioned violations of human rights (e.g., the use of torture in counterterrorism operations).
• Show documented behavioral willingness to volunteer for international aid and cross-cultural peace-building organizations.

Reliability

The reliability of the IWAHS has been rigorously demonstrated across numerous empirical studies involving both American and cross-national populations (including European, Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern cohorts).

Internal Consistency

Across validation studies conducted by McFarland et al. (2012) and independent international replications, the 9-item IWAH subscale consistently demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability:

• Identification with All Humanity (Subscale C): Cronbach’s α coefficients consistently range between .86 and .93 across collegiate and general population samples. McDonald’s ω coefficients yield comparable estimates (ω > .88).
• National Identification (Subscale B): Cronbach’s α coefficients range between .85 and .91.
• Community Identification (Subscale A): Cronbach’s α coefficients range between .80 and .87.

Corrected item-total correlations for the IWAH subscale items consistently exceed .50, with the vast majority falling between .60 and .78, indicating high item homogeneity without excessive redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

Temporal stability assessments have confirmed that IWAH functions as an enduring socio-cognitive orientation rather than a transient, fluctuating mood state. Over intervals ranging from two weeks to six months, test-retest reliability coefficients (r_tt) routinely fall between .75 and .84, confirming substantial longitudinal stability in non-interventional conditions.

Factor Analysis

The underlying factor structure of the IWAHS has been extensively evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) across diverse linguistic adaptations and demographic cohorts.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Structure

Structural evaluations test several competing models:

1. Unidimensional Model: A single global factor onto which all 27 items load (consistently exhibits poor fit: CFI < .60, RMSEA > .14).
2. Stem-Based Model: A 9-factor model grouped by question stem (consistently exhibits unacceptable fit).
3. Three-Factor Oblique Model: Three correlated latent factors representing target groups: Community (Items 1a–9a), Nation (Items 1b–9b), and All Humanity (Items 1c–9c). This model consistently exhibits superior, robust fit to the data across international studies.
4. Bifactor and Multitrait-Multimethod (MTMM) Models: Models accounting for target factors alongside method variance (stem-specific variance) demonstrate that target-specific variance dominates, with the latent IWAH factor retaining substantial common variance independent of item-method effects.

Model Fit Indices and Factor Loadings

Typical fit indices for the correlated three-factor structural model in empirical research meet strict psychometric cutoffs:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .92 – .96
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .91 – .95
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .045 – .065 (with 90% confidence intervals well within acceptable limits)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .040 – .055

Standardized factor loadings on the primary latent IWAH dimension are uniformly high, with all 9 items loading above .60, and several items (notably Stem 5: identification/concern, Stem 6: caring when bad things happen, and Stem 9: desire to help) displaying standardized loadings exceeding .75 to .85.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The technical administration details and structural format of the IWAHS are outlined below:

• Instrument Type: Self-report psychological scale / survey inventory.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (typically ages 16 and older).
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes.
• Total Number of Response Judgments: 27 ratings (comprising 9 fundamental item stems, each evaluated across 3 comparative target groups: Community, Nation, All Humanity).
• Target Categories:
  • a. People in my community (Local level)
  • b. Americans [or alternative sovereign nationality depending on country of administration] (National level)
  • c. People all over the world / All humans everywhere (Global superordinate level)
• Response Formats: 5-point Likert scales tailored across item stems:
  • Item 1: 1 = not at all close, 2 = not very close, 3 = just a little or somewhat close, 4 = pretty close, 5 = very close.
  • Item 2: 1 = almost never, 2 = rarely, 3 = occasionally, 4 = often, 5 = very often.
  • Item 3: 1 = almost nothing in common, 2 = little in common, 3 = some in common, 4 = quite a bit in common, 5 = very much in common.
  • Items 4 through 9: 1 = not at all, 2 = just a little, 3 = somewhat, 4 = quite a bit, 5 = very much.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • No items are reverse-coded.
  • Subscale scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean (or sum) of the 9 items for each respective target group:
  • Community Identification: Sum or mean of items 1a, 2a, 3a, 4a, 5a, 6a, 7a, 8a, 9a (Mean range: 1.00 – 5.00).
  • National Identification: Sum or mean of items 1b, 2b, 3b, 4b, 5b, 6b, 7b, 8b, 9b (Mean range: 1.00 – 5.00).
  • Identification with All Humanity (IWAH): Sum or mean of items 1c, 2c, 3c, 4c, 5c, 6c, 7c, 8c, 9c (Mean range: 1.00 – 5.00).
  • Higher scores indicate higher levels of psychological identification, attachment, and moral commitment to the respective collective.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Identification with All Humanity Scale was first formally presented in early empirical validation studies by Sam McFarland and Derek Brown in 2008 and comprehensively published in the landmark paper by McFarland, Webb, and Brown in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2012. The instrument is considered an open-access psychometric tool for non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research. No licensing fees or prior formal permissions are required for non-profit academic research, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and formal citation are given to the original authors. For commercial applications, organizational consulting assessments, or revenue-generating software implementations, researchers must contact Dr. Sam McFarland or Western Kentucky University to secure written authorization.

References

• McFarland, S., & Brown, D. (2008). Who believes that identification with all humanity is ethical? Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, KY.
• McFarland, S., Webb, M., & Brown, D. (2012). All humanity is my ingroup: A measure and studies of identification with all humanity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(5), 830–853. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0028724
• McFarland, S. (2011). The slow creation of humanity. Political Psychology, 32(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9221.2010.00803.x
• Reese, G., Proch, J., & Finn, C. (2015). Identification with all humanity: The role of self-definition and self-investment. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45(4), 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2102
• Sparkman, D. J., & Hamer, K. (2020). Seeing the human in others: A review of the causes and consequences of identification with all humanity. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 14(9), e12554. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12554
• Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.
• Turner, J. C., Hogg, M. A., Oakes, P. J., Reicher, S. D., & Wetherell, M. S. (1987). Rediscovering the social group: A self-categorization theory. Basil Blackwell.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)