Thinking well, acting well: how different are they really?
Altruism. It’s a word most have come across; one that comes with an unquestionable positive connotation, and one that many strive to exemplify.
When you type in altruism into Google Images, depictions of religious almsgiving and contemporary selflessness are omnipresent and striking. While it may not have you running across the room to grab a dictionary, it calls for a structured definition that is often lost in colloquial speech.
Psychological altruism is a construct defined as “acting out of concern for the well-being of others, without regard to your own self-interest” (1). Now the question is, how does one go about measuring altruism? After spending some time looking at published research, the “Self-Report Altruism Scale” developed by Rushton et al. was a popular hit (2). It consists of 20 items, all of which individuals are asked to rate their answers on a 0–4 frequency scale. The following statements are examples from the questionnaire:
“I have offered to help a handicapped or elderly stranger across a street”
“I have given a stranger a lift in my car”
Looking at this kind of scale, however, raised more questions than it managed to answer for me.
How can one actually operationalize altruism through a scale like the one above when it’s definition is confounded by so many other variables? Many of the statements in the scale above seem to measure active behaviours and spontaneous social interaction, most of which involve putting oneself out there. An obvious issue that came to my mind was how extraversion-introversion, one of the Big Five personality traits, could interact with this measure. While not all introverts are shy, being timid is often a major proponent of introversion and could impede their altruism score if this was the case.
Extraversion, by definition, involves social behaviour. When it comes to a trait like altruism, however, prosocial actions are only part of the construct (e.g., it also includes more “silent” behaviours such as donating blood). More importantly, it mostly encompasses a belief — it involves concern for others. The question as to whether altruism relates to one’s actual behaviours, or one’s thoughts thus comes into play. Say I give you the following situation, relating to the following statement: “I have helped a classmate who I did not know that well with an assignment when my knowledge was greater than his or hers.”
Both Person A and Person B have the immediate thought of helping the student, and both show a heightened degree of wanting to help him/her. The difference between the two individuals, then, is their comfort level in going about that plan. So my question was whether altruism should be about going through with a selfless thought, or simply about having said thought.
It was hard for me to imagine that someone would argue that Person A is fundamentally more altruistic than person B, but a rigid scale measuring altruism would. This seems to infer that someone who is outgoing and is more comfortable in social situations will by default have a higher altruistic score, since many items pertain to social comfortability. Indeed, many would argue that someone who truly thinks altruistically should be deemed altruistic, but this represents a major pitfall in psychological testing: measuring behaviours and declared beliefs is possible, but testing unconscious thoughts is much more difficult. Thus, all we have to rely on is items that seem to be linked with altruistic behaviours. It is also important to note that many statements also relate to altruistic behaviours that would seem equally likely for a gregarious or shy personality (e.g., giving money to charity), and I am simply presenting an example of how other personality characteristics that have nothing to do with selfishness could seem to have an impact on one’s score on another measure.
My aim was to use altruism as an example of the importance of construct definition (e.g., what does it really mean to be altruistic) when it comes to measurement. In this case, calling into question whether altruistic thoughts (or “silent actions”) should be given more weight in the context of psychological testing. Overall, this provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon trait definitions and how they are operationalized, and to understand how certain facets of psychological constructs may be occasionally overlooked.
Student ID: 260577495
- http://www.philosophytalk.org/community/blog/ken-taylor/2015/04/psychological-vs-biological-altruism
2. http://philipperushton.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/personality-prosocial-rushton-personality-individual-differences-1981.pdf
