Conceptualisation and measurement of altruism

Introductory waffle

This is very much a work-in-progress blog post, written in a bit of a rush. I hope to edit it ‘sometime’ to make it more clear, readable, and engaging, especially for non psychology students. This week’s topic is the Conceptualisation and Measurement of altruism. My guess is that it will be less interesting to non psychology students than are some of the other posts on this blog: it may be at times a bit too specific and technical. If you choose to read on, though, I hope my guess proves to be wrong.

Conceptualisation

We are examining the putative phenomenon of people being concerned about the positive welfare of someone or something other than themselves. We are calling that putative phenomenon “altruism”. At this stage, we are not concerned with how such altruism fits with any other conceptualisation of “altruism”.

Expressions as imperfect indicators of altruistic concern

If concern for the positive welfare of others exists, it cannot be examined directly. We can only examine what may be markers or expressions of such concern. We can examine how people (including ourselves) seem to think, feel, and behave, and we can argue about how consistent that is with a possibility that such people are to some extent concerned about someone else’s positive welfare.

We can be wrong about how people (including ourselves) are actually thinking, feeling, and behaving and we can also be wrong that particular thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are, in fact, markers or expressions of concern about the positive welfare of others.

Variation

People’s apparent (and likely actual) concern for the positive welfare of others varies in important ways. Among other things, it can be rare or frequent; fleeting or enduring; narrow or inclusive; intense or feeble; dominant or attenuated or silenced by other concerns; and, when enacted, effective, ineffective, or counter-productive.

Ideally there would be a single measure that captured all of these features so that any instance of and change in apparent altruism could be accurately measured. We are far from having such a measure, even if one were possible and practical. Instead, we have measures which attempt to capture apparent altruism that is either highly specific in manner, space, and time (e.g., attempting to give a particular form of help to a particular person on a particular occasion) or is relatively broad in manner, space, and time (i.e., attempting to provide lots of type of help to lots of others on lots of occasions, e.g., dedicating one’s life to becoming the most helpful person one can be).

Measurement matching

Research in attitude psychology (Ajzen & Fishbein, 1980) and personality psychology (Epstein, 1979) has compellingly demonstrated that measures work best if they are used to measure the phenomenon they are intended to measure. (Well, duh!) A measure that accurately predicts whether or not a person will put money in a charity tin when it is waved under her or his nose may not be very accurate at predicting how helpful that person is, on average, across a wide range of helping opportunities. Similarly, a measure that accurately differentiates people according to how helpful they are ‘on average’ may not be particularly good at predicting whether or not one of those people will put money in a charity tin when it is waved under his or her nose on their way to work one day. What people do on specific occasions may be a poor indicator of what they typically do and vice versa.

States and dispositions

As I am using the terms here, “states” are things that exist in a particular moment and “dispositions” are tendencies. As just mentioned, concern for others on a particular occasion may or may not reflect a tendency to be concerned about others on average over time and someone having an altruistic disposition may or may not accurately predict how altruistic they will be on a specific occasion.

Focus and expansiveness

As I am using the terms here, “focus” and “expansiveness” roughly refer to how many others’ positive welfares people care about. Similar to what has just been said, concern for a specific other (e.g., one’s child) may or may not accurately predict concern for others more generally (e.g., all people), just as concern for others in general may or may not accurately predict concern for particular others (e.g., an astonishingly irritating colleague).

Particular or general concern

As I am using the terms here, “particular” concern is expressing concern for another’s welfare in a very specific way, (e.g., by experiencing a particular feeling or adopting a particular body posture or by providing emotional support or by handing over money, etc.) while “general” concern is expressing concern for another’s welfare in range of ways (e.g., with feeling, manner, and behaviour, etc.) or by tailoring the expression of one’s concerns to the specific perceived needs of the other (e.g., by flexibly providing whatever seems to offer the best hope of helping the other).

One-off measurement

To try to keep this post even remotely manageable, I will consider in it only measures that are administered on a single occasion. Nevertheless, the measures reviewed will differ according whether they are claimed or appear to capture state or dispositional altruism, focused or expansive altruism, and particular or general altruism.

Warning

The terminology I have just laid out is not commonly used and the distinctions I have just made are often not considered in discussion of particular altruism measures. This may temporarily add to confusion but my hope is that it will eventually lead to improved clarity and understanding (and better measures and interpretation of the results obtained from them!)

Measurement of relatively dispositional, expansive, general altruism

Rushton’s “Self-Report Altruism Scale” (SRAS)

People completing the SRAS (see p. 297 of Rushton et al., 1981) report how frequently they have engaged in each of 20 behaviours likely to have been helpful to individuals they did not know very well. Example items are, “I have helped push a stranger’s car out of the snow”; “I have delayed an elevator and held the door open for a stranger”, and “I have given a stranger a lift in my car”.

Respondents are usually given a score of 1 each time they say “Never”; 2 each time they say “Once”; 3 each time they say “More than once”; 4 each time they say “Often”; and 5 each time they say “Very often”.

People usually therefore obtain a total score of between 20 (if they report never having engaged in any of the behaviours) to 100 (if they report having very often engaged in all 20 behaviours).

The SRAS is rare among altruism measures in asking about people’s ‘helping behaviours’ without asking or speculating about their reasons for engaging in those behaviours.

It is possible, of course, to help strangers for reasons other than caring about their positive welfare. One may help without any strong motive (e.g., from habit or convention) or for only instrumental selfish reasons (e.g., in the hope of being rewarded). Nevertheless, higher scores on the SRAS indicate helping strangers in lots of different ways, with considerable frequency, or both. It does seem likely that this is an indicator of dispositional, relatively expansive, relatively general altruism. Altruistic people are likely to be helpful in various ways according to strangers’ perceived needs and people who are frequently and variously helpful to apparently needy strangers are likely to be relatively dispositionally altruistic.

Answers to the 20 questions tend to correlate positively with each other. This means that the scale has good (enough) internal reliability. (It could be better, though!) This is important because the majority of the questions and the scale as a whole each seem to be measuring more or less ‘the same thing’ (or at least things that tend to highly correlate with each other). Frequencies of helping push strangers’ cars out of snow, holding doors open for strangers, and giving strangers lifts seem not to be independent of each other. Rather, they seem to be measuring something common that each specific instance of helping is representative of: presumably something like “a tendency to be helpful to strangers”.

If the SRAS is given to the same people on different occasions, people’s scores at one time correlate with their scores at other times. People who get relatively high (or low) scores on one occasion tend to get relatively high (or low) scores on the other occasion(s). This means that the scale has good (enough) test-retest reliability. This is important in a dispositional measure. Unless something fairly radical happens to change things, dispositions are relatively stable across time. That is what it means for something to be dispositional. Someone who is relatively low (or high) in dispositional altruism should obtain relatively low (or high) dispositional altruism scores whenever it is measured (using an appropriate disposition measure).

People’s own scores on the SRAS correlate with scores other people obtain when rating them. This means that (in addition to being easily converted for use as an other-report measure) the SRAS has good inter-rater reliability. This is particularly important in self-report measures which can have the weakness of being susceptible to various well-known errors and biases. Having decent inter-rater reliability means that people’s self-reports tend to agree with reports others make of them, which gives some assurance that scores are accurate representations of what is being measured, i.e., relative frequency of helping strangers, on average, across a variety of contexts.

People’s scores on the SRAS correlate with other measures of their helpfulness and with other things that would be expected to correlate with it. For example, people’s SRAS scores correlate (r = .20) with other people’s rating of those people as generally caring, helpful, considerate of others’ feelings, and willing to make a sacrifice (Rushton et al., 1981, p. 296). This means that the scale has some (I repeat, some) claim to being valid. To some extent, it seems to be indicating what it claims to be measuring, i.e., frequent and general helping of strangers because of dispositional concern for the welfare of others, or similar.

In combination, data about the scale’s reliability and validity provide evidence that it is (at least) psychometrically adequate as an indicator of what it claims to be measuring.

In my opinion, the RSAS has two main weaknesses as a measure of dispositional, expansive, general altruism. It is has a serious confound and its frames of reference are unspecified, unclear and, I suspect, inconsistently guessed.  

A measure is confounded when something other than the thing being measured systematically affects what the measure indicates. SRAS scores are cofounded by opportunities to help. (This is one reason SRAS scores often correlate with age.) Individuals who have never seen snow and do not own a car cannot obtain a score as high as potentially equally altruistic car-owning individuals who live in snowy countries. If people across ‘groups’ (e.g., genders, countries, etc.) have different opportunities to help, SRAS scores comparing those groups will show differences that reflect those different opportunities as well as any differences in concern for the positive welfare of others, including their willingness to act on such altruistic concerns. There are likely to be sex differences in giving strangers lifts in cars in Saudi Arabia, not because Saudi men are more altruistic than Saudi women but because Saudi women are not allowed to drive cars.

The SRAS asks how often people have engaged in various behaviours but it does not tell them how to understand the terms “often” or “very often”. There are various ways people might do this. They can choose over what time period they are making their decision and they can choose with whom they compare themselves. These are frame of reference problems. I gave strangers lifts in my car a lot in my 20s but I have probably done so only a handful of times in the last two decades. This is certainly “more than once” but is it “often” or “very often”? If I take a lifetime view and compare myself with “most people in my country”, I guess it is often and maybe very often. If I take a “nowadays” view and compare myself to “drivers of the world” it probably doesn’t even count as often.

In combination, issues such as these make SRAS scores imprecise and difficult to compare (across time, across individuals, and across groups) with confidence.

Nevertheless, the SRAS is one of the most commonly used self-report measures of dispositional, expansive, and general altruism and it is certainly better than many of the alternatives, especially if used on samples whose members have had similar opportunities to engage in the behaviours asked about.

(Johnson et al., 1989 add to the SRAS questions with many more to try to address other limitations they perceive with the SRAS. I believe this approach has had mixed success.)

Aquino and Reed’s Internalised subscale of the Self-importance of Moral Identity Scale (ISMIS)

People completing the ISMIS (see Appendix on p. 1286 of Reed & Aquino, 2003) are asked to think of a real or imaginary person who is “Caring, Compassionate, Fair, Friendly, Generous, Helpful, Hardworking, Honest, and Kind.” They are then asked five questions about being such a person, e.g., “It would make me feel good to be a person who has these characteristics”, “Having these characteristics is not really important to me”, and “I strongly desire to have these characteristics”. Each answer is scored between 1 and 5, where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 5 = “strongly agree”. An average of those scores is then taken (once scores for which low numbers represent high internalisation have been 'reversed').

Thus, scores on the ISMIS seem to most directly indicate differences in people’s strength of self-reported aspiration to be a particular type of person: “moral” for Aquino and Reed but seemingly almost equally interpretable as “altruistic”, i.e., presumably relatively enduringly,  expansively, and generally concerned about the positive welfare of others.

It is possible that some people concerned about the positive welfare of others would not strongly aspire to have all of the characteristics in Aquino and Reed’s list. They might want to be caring, kind, and compassionate, for example, but not especially hard-working or honest. It is also possible that some people might aspire towards only limited altruism; being passionate about the positive welfare of their friends and family, for example, but indifferent to anyone else’s welfare. If such people exist (and I think they do), the ISMIS might not capture the full extent of their altruism.

Other people may not notice or may ignore the “and” towards the end of the attributes listed in the ISMIS. They might give themselves relatively high scores if they have or aspire to any package of traits listed, e.g., if they strive to be fair, friendly, hard-working, and honest even if they do not care too much about being particularly compassionate and helpful.

The two paragraphs immediately above raise the possibility that even accurate and honest self-completion of the ISMIS might lead to under-representation of some people’s altruism and over-representation of others’.

Nevertheless, the ISMIS has impressive psychometric qualities. It has the usual indicators of reliability and validity (including as a measure of relatively enduring, expansive, general altruism). It is also short (just five questions) and only requires people to identify how much they care about being or becoming a particular type of person – a relatively easy task.

The biggest limitation to the ISRIS is arguably that people may have different ideas about what they actually have to do to legitimately consider themselves aspirationally caring, compassionate, etc. Research suggests that nearly everybody thinks they are ‘good’ and indeed better than most other people – even if they could show very little evidence to support such claims (e.g., Sedikides et al., 2014). Whereas honest and accurate completion of the SRAS requires that people regularly act in multiple helpful ways to obtain high scores, the ISRIS may allow people to sincerely claim to be altruistic without them having to do very much by way of actually helping others.

It should be noted that there is some research which suggests that the higher peoples’ ISMIS scores, the more they will tend to engage in certain forms of prosocial behaviour (e.g., donating and volunteering). Nevertheless, more validating studies would provide greater reassurance that this is indeed the case. Until (and indeed probably even) then, it would probably be wise for researchers administering this measure to also administer measures of actual helping behaviour.

In sum, Aquino and Reed’s measure seems to provide a quick and simple indicator of how committed people are to having characters in which enduring, expansive, and general altruism is prominent.

Sprecher and Fehr’s Compassionate Love for Strangers – Humanity (CL4SH)

Sprecher and Fehr (2005) developed a measure of Compassionate Love that can be applied to more or less any target. In this section I will consider the Compassionate Love for Strangers – Humanity scale.

People completing the CL4SH (which I pronounce “Clash”) measure report how true of them they feel 21 statements are, e.g., “If a person (a stranger) is troubled, I usually feel extreme tenderness and caring”, “I tend to feel compassion for people, even though I do not know them”, and “One of the activities that provides me with the most meaning to my life is helping others in the world when they need help.”

Respondents are given a score between 1 and 7 for each answer, where 1 = “not at all true of me” and 7 = “very true of me”.

Thus, scores on the CL4SH measure indicates people’s self-reported emotional, motivational, and behavioural concern for the positive welfare of strangers - humanity.

A few of the questions on the CL4SH scale arguably measure things that are not necessarily associated with altruism. These include perspective-taking (which is one possible route to and aid for altruism, but it is possible to be altruistic without taking others’ perspectives and vice versa) and empathic joy (which often happens alongside altruism but need not; we can feel sad knowing that a loved other’s happiness will be short-lived). Few of the questions are like this, though, and answers to them frequently will be correlated with the other answers (because other-concern, perspective-taking, and emotional contagion often do co-occur).

As with the other measures reviewed so far, the CL4SH scale has at least adequate psychometric properties, i.e., reliability and validity.

In brief, the CL4SH scale provides a simple, psychometrically-adequate, direct measure of people’s enduring altruism towards the expansive group of strangers – humanity.

Perception and learning

People who care about the positive welfare of others ‘generally’ may see and interact with the world in different ways than do less altruistic people. They may be specially attuned to seeing (Den Daas et al., 2013) and learning (Kwak et al., 2014) things likely to be relevant to assessing and enhancing valued others’ welfare. I predict that altruism measurement will soon develop in ways that reverse the order of reporting this relationship: future studies will examine people’s perceptions and learning processes in an attempt to reveal their concerns for the welfare of others. I think this is an exciting prospect.

Poorer measures of relatively dispositional, expansive, general altruism

Caprara et al.’s (2005) measure of ‘Adult Prosocialness’

This is a 16-item self-report measure the questions of which sample a wide-range of arguable ‘prosocial’ behaviours (sharing, lending, helping, volunteering, consoling) and characteristics (perspective taking, emotional contagion, empathic concern, emotional intelligence).

This measure may or may not be an excellent measure of adult prosociality (broadly, individual differences in ‘prosocial personality’) but it has two main weaknesses as a measure of altruism. First, the various ‘bits’ measured (perspective taking, empathic concern, etc.) may well correlate highly with each other for people who are extremely high or low in adult prosociality but need not always do so among most people. It is easily possible for a person to be good at perspective taking but low in empathic concern, for example. Second, the scale as a whole may not correspond too closely with dispositional, expansive, general altruism as I am using that phrase. It may be possible, for example, to be high in concern for others’ positive welfare without manifesting high levels of perspective taking, empathic concern, etc. This might happen if someone is concerned about others’ welfare (as one understands it) for moral reasons or from attempted conformity to religious edicts. A zealot trying to save others’ souls may be genuinely interested in their welfare but be tragically short of empathic concern.

Penner et al. (1995)’s ‘Prosocial Personality Battery’ (PSP)

The PSP combines and distilled a lot of potentially related self-report measures, the items of which formed into two ‘factors’ (groups). One is labelled ‘other-oriented empathy’ and comprises questions about perspective taking, empathic concern, ascriptions of responsibility, and various forms of moral reasoning. The other is labelled ‘helpfulness’ and comprises measures of helping behaviour and the absence of personal distress when witnessing others’ suffering.

My evaluation of this measure is much the same as my evaluation of the Caprara et al. measure just above.

Romer et al.’s (1986) Helping Orientation Questionnaire (HOQ)

The HOQ asks respondents which of 4 provided options they would be most likely to do in each of 23 scenarios. In each case, one alternative is deemed “altruistic”, usually more or less in the way that I am using the term. The other options are deemed to reveal different motives, e.g., helping only as a means of obtaining purely selfish benefits, e.g., being rewarded. In one scenario, for example, people will be scored as altruistic if they say that they would lend a friend some clothes if the friend really wanted to borrow them - rather than refusing to lend them the clothes or doing so only on condition that they could borrow something in return. (Most people choose a predominance of altruistic answers.) Respondents are given an overall altruism score depending on how many more allegedly altruism-revealing options they select compared to other people being measured. The psychometric qualities of the measure are lamentable and it is mentioned here only because it has been influential in the development of (somewhat) better instruments, e.g., Penner et al.’s (1995) Prosocial Personality Battery.

Van Lange et al.’s (1997) Social Value Orientation (SVO)

The measure of SVO in this paper asks people to make 9 choices between 3 options, A, B, or C. Each choice involves allocating some points (that people were told to imagine were valuable) to the self and some points to an anonymous other individual. Options A, B, and C differ in systematic ways so that, for example, A results in self and other getting identical points (e.g., 520 each), B results in the self getting the same amount of points as in Option A but the other getting far fewer (e.g., 520 to self and 120 to other), and C results in the self getting more points than in Option A and the other getting fewer points than in Option A but more points than in Option B (e.g., 580 to self and 320 to other). Option A is considered to be a “prosocial” choice because it maximizes the points given to the other at some cost to the self (relative to choosing Option C). People are said to have a “prosocial value orientation” if they select the “prosocial” option in at least 6 of their 9 allocation decisions. Measures like this are very popular. I have more issues with them than makes sense to go into now. The main one is that I see no tension between someone being extraordinarily altruistic ‘in real life’ but not making the most prosocial choices in this particular setting, i.e., when allocating points between the self and a random stranger in a game-like context. Slightly more formally, a single measure of how people act on a single highly particular occasion is likely to be an unreliable, invalid indicator of how they act over a wide range of situations over an extended period. In other words, I doubt Van Lange et al’s claim that such measures are strong indicators of people’s “general tendencies toward others” (p. 736). They seem to me to be measures of something much more specific (and not necessarily altruistic). See my comments below on “Economic Game Behaviour” for some related issues. See Murphy and Ackerman (2013) for a more thorough consideration of SVO measurement.

Measurement of relatively dispositional, expansive, particular altruism

Davis’ Empathic Concern (EC)

People completing this measure report how much they agree or disagree with each of seven statements concerning their regular, mainly emotional, reactions to others’ perceived welfare, e.g., “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me”, “I would describe myself as a pretty soft-hearted person”, and “When I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel sort of protective towards them”.

For each answer, respondents obtain a score between 1 and 5, where 1 = “does not describe me well” and 5 = “describes me very well”. An average of those scores is then taken.

Thus, scores on the EC measure indicate people’s enduring tendencies to experience sympathetic or compassionate feelings when perceiving others in need.

It is possible to care about others’ welfare without experiencing sympathy or compassion. Moral beliefs can motivate altruism without any accompanying emotions and emotions other than sympathy can also evoke altruism, e.g., anger. Nevertheless, feeling sympathy, etc., is one indicator or form of positive other-concern.

As I said in relation to the CL4SH, there is validating data showing that EC scores correlate with various forms of actual helping behaviour, probably because empathic concern is one cause of attempted helping. The EC scale has at least adequate psychometric properties in other respects, too.

Davis’ Empathic Concern therefore provides a brief and simple measure of people’s enduring tendency to experience compassion when considering others’ apparent misfortune.

Measurement of relatively dispositional, focused, general altruism

Sprecher and Fehr’s Compassionate Love for Close Others (CL4CO)

Sprecher and Fehr (2005) developed three versions of their Compassionate Love scale. One of these was the Compassionate Love for Close Others (“Claco”) scale, also known as the Compassionate Love for Friends and Family (CL4FF) scale. This is essentially exactly the same as the CL4SH scale (see above) but replaces references to “strangers”, “humankind”, and similar with ones to “friends”, “family”, “loved ones”, and the like, e.g., “If a family member or close other is troubled, I usually feel extreme tenderness and caring”, “I tend to feel compassion for people who are close to me”, and “One of the activities that provides me with the most meaning to my life is helping others with whom I have a close relationship.”

Everything else I might say about the CL4CO measure is more or less what I would say about the CL4SH one. Thus, the CL4CO scale provides a simple, psychometrically-adequate, direct measure of people’s enduring emotional, motivational, and behavioural altruism towards the relatively specific ‘group’ of close others.

Sprecher and Fehr’s Compassionate Love for Specific Others (CL4SO)

Sprecher and Fehr (2005) third scale measures Compassionate Love for Specific Others (“Claso”). Again, this is essentially exactly the same as both the CL4SH and the CL4CO scales but rather than making explicit reference to strangers and humanity or to close others, questions have blanks in them for participants to fill-in with the name of someone or something they love, e.g., “If ______ is troubled, I usually feel extreme tenderness and caring”, “I tend to feel compassion for ______”, and “One of the activities that provides me with the most meaning to my life is helping _______.”

Most of what I might say about the CL4SO measure is more or less what I would say about the CL4SH or CL4CO ones, with two exceptions. First, the CL4SO actually subsumes the other two scales; it is just that the researchers have ‘pre-filled’ the spaces with either ‘strangers and humanity’ or ‘close other’ references. Secondly, the CL4SO allows measurement of altruism towards almost anything that can be loved and perceived as having a welfare, including non-human targets such as, for example, “my pet” or “the environment” This gives the scale an impressive potential range of applicability. (This range is limited somewhat by some of the items, largely the confounding ones, which also require that the recipient of altruism has to be able to experience things so that, for example, people can take its perspective. This prevents the unadulterated scale being used as a measure of altruism towards things without such capacities, such as one’s nation or the planet.)

Thus, the CL4SO scale provides a simple, psychometrically-adequate, direct measure of people’s enduring emotional, motivational, and behavioural altruism towards almost anything that participants might think of as having welfare.

Measurement of relatively state, focused, particular altruism

Responsive (apparent) helping

A number of researchers (e.g., Levine, 2003) have used observations of actual or attempted helping as an indication of altruism. These measures are often taken in ‘real world’ situations where people are confronted with the possibility of helping when someone else appears to have done something like:

• Lost or forgotten to post a letter
• Dropped, spilled, or be struggling to carry one or more objects
• Had a fall or other accident
• Experienced a seizure
• Some other thing which means they would likely benefit from assistance

Helping responses are often measured in one or both of two ways: whether or not help is given and either the extent (e.g., how many spilled pens picked up) or the speed (e.g., delay before picking up the first pen) of helping.

Such measures have a number of considerable strengths. They are realistic, observable, and straightforward. They have two main potential weaknesses as measures of altruism.

First, any behaviour can be engaged in for reasons other than wanting to improve another’s welfare. (I can pick up an addressed envelope out of curiosity and post it because my wife commands me to.) Second, absence of a particular behaviour is not compelling evidence for a lack of concern about others’ positive welfare. (I may have simply not noticed a need for or an opportunity to help.) For such reasons, no single act is an infallible indicator of altruism and nor is the absence of that act.

Potential helping behaviours differ in the extent they have such weaknesses. Some behaviours can clearly be engaged in for reasons other than particularly wanting to improve another’s welfare, e.g., putting money on a church collection plate when everyone else has and when people are clearly watching. Some helping opportunities are easy to miss or to clearly identify as such, e.g., a fellow rush-hour commuter leaving on her seat a newspaper she planned to read later. Nevertheless, some helping opportunities can be difficult to miss or to misconstrue and aspects of the situation can be such that people who help can often be fairly safely assumed to do so in large part because of concern for another’s positive welfare, e.g., comforting or protecting someone who is obviously in need when doing so is personally costly. (Just to be clear – cost to the helper makes it easier to identify their altruism; it is not a required element of altruism.)

To the extent that performing a behaviour seems clearly motived by concern for the positive welfare of another and that not performing the behaviour is difficult to consider in any way other than as revealing a lack of such concern, responsive helping can be an excellent measure of state, focused, particular altruism. Further, to the extent that the revealed altruism (or lack thereof) can be confidently predicted to generalise to other times, situations, and specific ways of helping, the behaviour may also serve as an indicator of more dispositional, expansive, or general helping. The onus of course is on anyone who wishes to claim that a specific behaviour reveals altruism to provide evidence that conditions such as these have been met, especially if there seems good reason to doubt this.

Economic Game behaviour

Economic games are an important sub-set of responsive (apparent) helping. It is often claimed that some of these games reveal altruism, perhaps especially the Dictator Game (DG).

In the DG a person receives a sum of money or a similar ‘good’ or resource. They are then asked if they want to give any of it to someone else. How much they give is commonly used as a measure of altruism. My view is that this is justified (only) to the extent that the conditions specified at the end of the previous section are satisfied. I think that these conditions are usually very poorly satisfied.

The DG is often used in situations in which a person is invited to divide a sum of money, let’s say £10, between themselves and an anonymous stranger, usually having received explicit assurances that they will never meet the other person and that the other person will not know who their dictator was. While it is of course possible that some people are motivated by concern for the positive welfare of the other in such circumstances, it seems likely that such concern will be rare, slight, and play an extremely limited role in most people’s decision making and subsequent action. Why would or should anyone in the standard DG scenario care too much about the positive welfare of an anonymous other who will be better off if they receive any money, especially when the ‘assurances’ received almost certainly provide strong hints about ‘how to play the game’, e.g., “Keep as much money as your conscience and standing in the eyes of the experimenter will allow” or “Clearly you should give the other person a decent wodge – unless you want to reveal yourself as an immoral, selfish toad” (depending on how people interpret the rules of the game on any given occasion; Liberman et al., 2004).

More formally, there are lots of possible motives for people to give money to another in the DG other than altruistic concern and players keeping money is probably a better indicator of their concern for personal monetary gain in a zero-sum situation than it is an absence of concern for another’s welfare (although there probably isn’t much of the latter, either, but the main problem is that keeping money in the DG confounds concern for another with concern for self).

To be clear, it seems likely that giving in economic games can be motivated by and indicate concern for the positive welfare of another (Batson et al., 1995; Batson & Moran, 1999; Bettinger & Slonim, 2006). It just probably usually isn’t and doesn’t (Bardsley, 2008; Krupka & Weber, 2013). Similarly, behavior in the highly artificial and managed situation of economic games can sometimes reflect more general inclinations and behaviours (Peysakhovich et al., 2014). It just probably usually doesn’t (Laury & Taylor, 2008; Levitt & List, 2007).

Heal’s Alien Thought Experiment

Jane Heal (1991, p. 164-165) created a captivating thought experiment which essentially serves as a fairly crude measure of altruism. Here it is:

Imagine that you are kidnapped by some aliens. They present you with a console on which are two buttons, A and B. Your choice is to press one of the buttons. The aliens explain to you that they have your loved ones in their power. Whatever you do, you will never see them again, but their future fate rests in your hands. If you press button A they will be well looked after and live long and happy lives; you, on the other hand, will be rendered unconscious as soon as your finger touches the button and when you come round you will have had a set of delusive memories planted in your brain, according to which you betrayed them to suffering; you will be plagued with guilt and misery. If you press button B, however, your loved ones will be tortured, starved and degraded while you live happily, equipped with the delusive conviction that your nobility has preserved them. The aliens persuade you that they can do what they say. You see with your own eyes the effects of their brain manipulations on others and you become convinced of the extent of their power. The moment of choice is now; what will you do?

Choosing Button A indicates altruism towards your loved ones. In at least one fantastical situation, you claim willingness to bear significant personal cost to ensure specific others’ (i.e., loved ones’) positive welfare. You certainly claim to prefer this to the alternative option which involves condemning your loved ones to a miserable fate to ensure your own future welfare.

There are several limitations with using Heal’s thought experiment as a measure of altruism. One is its hypothetical nature and the problems of self-knowledge and self-report. What people say they would do sometimes bears little relation to what they actually would do. Without any validating studies, one has to be sceptical. Another is the required contrast between the two Options. It not clear whether someone pushing Button A is doing so because they like the claimed consequences of doing so, because they hate the claimed consequences of pushing Button B, or both. Are they actively pursuing positive welfare for those they love or ‘merely’ seeking to avoid a living hell for them? A third and parallel limitation is that each Button leads to two consequences, one for the self and one for loved others. However unlikely it may be, pushing Button A may also be motivated by not wishing to have false memories of personal nobility. A fourth is the all-or-nothing nature of the measurement: one must either be 100% altruistic or not. I could go on but it seems unfair to criticise something that was not intended to be a measure for not being a perfect measure!

I include Heal’s thought experiment here because it is a lovely illustration of a principle that could underpin a good altruism measure. While, as I have already mentioned, sacrifice is not an essential component of altruism, the extent of one’s willingness to make a sacrifice on another behalf is an indication of one’s concern for their positive welfare. The more altruistic one is towards someone or something, the more costs one will be willing to incur to improve their welfare by a set amount. Similarly, the more altruistic one is, the bigger the cost one will be willing to incur to improve another’s welfare by a set amount.

Anyone interested in developing a measure along these lines might also like to consider the following papers: Bélanger et al. (2014), Gómez et al. (2011), Jung et al. (2014), and Read and Loewenstein (1999).

Video Game Behaviour

Some video games give players an opportunity to help others. One example is provided by Lieberg et al.’s (2011) Zurich Prosocial Game (ZPG). In the ZPG there are occasions when players’ avatars will die unless a task is completed. At the same time, players have opportunities to help the avatars of other players not in competition with them. Similarly, in Zanon et al. (2014) players in virtual reality scenarios have the opportunity to help other players’ avatars when all the avatars are portrayed as being in mortal danger.

These specific examples of video game helping have similar weaknesses to many economic game measures of altruism. Helping may indicate things other than altruism; not helping may indicate things other than altruism being absent; altruism within the game may not reliably and validly indicate altruism outside the game; and so on. Moreover, to the extent that altruism does occur, it is not clear towards whom that altruism is directed. When players do altruistically help, are they concerned with the positive welfare of other players, of other players’ avatars, or both?

I nevertheless wanted to include video game altruism here, for two reasons. First, the most important aspect of altruism in video games is usually missed by those who discuss it. Players are deeply altruistic towards their own avatars, i.e., towards the characters who represent them and/or with whom they are identifying. Players often invest considerable resources (e.g., time, money, opportunity costs) in promoting and protecting their avatars’ perceived (because portrayed) welfare and react in multiple expressive ways according to avatars’ (portrayed) actual and possible fate, e.g., tensing up when the avatars are (portrayed as being) in peril; basking in avatars’ (portrayed) achievements; etc.

The second reason I wanted to include video game altruism measures here is because they have great promise. They are currently in their infancy but are likely to improve rapidly. They do not need to develop very much before they offer measures that are popular with participants (people like playing good games!), valid (well-designed games will able to differentiate concern for others’ positive welfare from other concerns, e.g., for the ‘self’, for morality, etc.); reliable (players’ behaviours are likely to be relatively consistent in all the ways that are important to demonstrate measurement reliability); and generalisable (people are likely to  play well-designed games in ways that predict how they think, feel, and behave in the world outside those games).

Batson’s State ‘Empathy’

People completing this measure report how strongly they are or were feeling each of the following states at a particular moment: sympathetic, moved, compassionate, tender, warm, and soft-hearted.

People obtain a score of 1 each time they say ‘Not at all’ and a score of 7 each time they say ‘Extremely’. An average of those scores is then taken.

Batson’s measure captures how sympathetic or compassionate people are feeling at a particular moment, usually in response to witnessing someone in distress. He describes this feeling (which he calls “empathy”) as an important precursor to altruism but for current purposes it is an emotional expression of altruism: there is plenty of evidence that such feelings are reliable and valid indicators of concern for the other’s positive welfare.

Batson’s State ‘Empathy’ therefore provides a brief, simple, and effective measure of a particular form or expression of altruism (i.e., an emotional one) evoked in particular situations (i.e., usually when perceiving others to be in personally-unwelcome unenviable circumstances).  

Facial and Bodily Expressions of Other-Concern

Nancy Eisenberg, Richard Fabes and their colleagues pioneered techniques to identify non-verbal expressions of other-concern beyond actual helping behaviour. They took pains to be able to differentiate such expressions (which reveal concern for the other’s welfare) from ones indicating mere personal distress when people confront situations they find upsetting (without being concerned about the others’ welfare, per se). So, for example, personal distress was thought to be revealed when a person’s eyebrows were “somewhat raised and pulled together” or the person “exhibited non-functional, nervous mouth and chin movements such as tightening or biting the lips”. Other-concern, on the other hand, was distinguished by a person having their “eyebrows pulled down flat and forward toward the bridge of the nose, furrowing in the centre of the brow (for some children), eyelids not pulled in tight or raised, head and body oriented forward, and the bottom eyelids raised slightly” (p. 138).

Eisenberg and Fabes (1990) provide an excellent review of this and related research. In it, they caution that experimental situations sometimes evoke self-presentation concerns, people can fake experience of particular emotions/concerns, and people differ in how emotionally expressive they are (note the “in some children” above). These researchers’ ambitions were also arguably hampered to a certain extent by the dual not-entirely-compatible goals of (a) wanting to identify markers of other-concern, and (b) wanting to do so in a way that maximally distinguished between other-concern and (solely) personal distress. This is potentially a limitation because people who are other-concerned are often likely to experience personal distress as well when witnessing or contemplating others’ dire situations or experiences.

A similar limitation dogs McEwan et al. (2014)’s claim to have identified what a compassionate expression looks like to such an extent that they been able to produce a set of photographed faces depicting such expressions. Their methodology is such that, at best, they can claim to have photographs which depict expressions that are more compassionate than are photographs depicting neutral or critical expressions. Participants in their study had to score sets of three photographed faces according to how each photo within each set expressed compassion/warmth, criticism, or neutrality. In each set, one face was clearly critical and another was wholly inexpressive. The photographs allegedly expressing compassion were rated as more compassionate than were the critical or neutral ones. It is a long leap from this to say that the former photographs actually conveyed compassion! That claim would require that people looking at the photographs would recognise compassion without any prompts or clues about what they were ‘supposed’ to be seeing. That is a much harder task and I suspect McEwen et al.’s faces would not pass it (see Widen et al., 2011)

It is also worth noting that many people may be skilled at recognising other-concern in people’s faces, posture, and gestures, even (or maybe even especially) if they are not given detailed recipes for how to recognise it.

Physiological Measures

Various physiological markers of altruism or related constructs have been proposed. These include heart rate (Eisenberg and Fabes, 1990), oxytocin (Barraza & Zak, 2009; Israel et al., 2012; Zak et al., 2007), vagal activity (Kogan et al., 2014), and changes in blood flow in particular brain regions (Zanon et al., 2014). I will consider each of these in depth in later posts. For now I shall simply express scepticism that a very close and discriminating relationship will be found between any of these things and altruism, particularly if the latter is poorly specified (Bartz, et al. 2011; DeWall et al., 2014; Jarrett, 2014; Love, 2014).

Coherence

It is difficult to avoid a conclusion that there is and probably never will be a perfect measure of altruism. It would be wrong to conclude in turn that we should give up trying to measure it and that every measure of altruism is completely unfit for purpose. Rather, we should recognise that each measure has its strengths and weaknesses and select from among them accordingly. We should also recognise that when we really want to know if someone is altruistic, we are likely to have to seek coherence among a number of different indicators.

I often invite my students to think about a time when they wondered if someone loved them. I suggest that what they did to try to answer this question was to think about all the possible evidence and seek to understand what the pattern of these indicators suggested. Doing this again yesterday made me think of fairy tales and Disney films. Princes wanting to marry princesses are often set quests as proof of their dedication (and worth). But, arduous and discriminating though such tests can be, they are not infallible. Many a plot rests on the possibility that a suitor seeks not a loving relationship with the princesses but marriage as a purely instrumental means of obtaining land, power, and other personal profits. Rare is the princess (or the father thereof) who is unable to ever reach a decision because of this possibility. Instead, they gather data across a range of times and situations, particularly those that might provoke suitors to reveal any caddish motives. Eventually, the only possible explanation for some noble man’s actions is their true love for the princess.

It ’aint all Disney (see plot)

True life can be trickier than cartoon life but the process is similar even if the outcome is not quite so certain. If someone genuinely cares about the positive welfare of another, such care should manifest itself in various or tailored ways. Although any given indicator may be individually unreliable, collectively they can often prove matters beyond reasonable doubt. Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992) provide a good example of such a multi-method approach, looking as they did at potential altruists’ hypothesis testing (trying to find out if need existed and how help might be provided), non-verbal indicators of empathic concern, and helping behaviours.

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Picture credits

Cartoon [Link]

Hug [Link]

Nun [Link]

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T. Farsides. (2014, October 18). Conception and measurement of altruism. Retrieved from http://tomfarsides.blogspot.com/2014/10/conceptualisation-and-measurement-of.html