Putting the 'A' in Prosocial: Development and Validation of a Measure of Trait Altruism
Abstract
Trait altruism reflects the tendency to perform behaviours with the goal of improving another’s welfare. Altruism is commonly measured using scales that assess how frequently the test-taker has performed specific prosocial actions. However, these scales assume that these behaviours are altruistically motivated and fail to consider what is known in the literature about the attitudes, values, and emotions that characterize altruistic individuals. Accordingly, altruism research would benefit from a new scale that draws upon the large body of interdisciplinary research and follows current best practices in scale development, as summarized in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 presents a review of the altruism literature, identifying underlying elements of trait altruism, including behaviours. Chapter 3 summarizes the development and refinement of the preliminary item pool for the new Altruistic Tendencies Questionnaire (ATQ), which incorporated feedback from three expert raters. Chapter 4 reports a study testing the preliminary psychometric properties of the altruism items in university students and North American adults. Exploratory factor analysis supported a unidimensional factor structure, and correlations with theoretically related personality traits and prosocial COVID-19 behaviours provided evidence of convergent validity. Additionally, this study demonstrated that scores on the ATQ accounted for unique variance in predicting donation intention. Chapter 5 replicated the factor structure using confirmatory factor analysis and found a similar pattern of trait correlations in a sample of adults in the U.K. Using a variant of the Dictator Game, it also demonstrated that the ATQ could predict generosity towards a charity. Finally, the study in Chapter 6 found that scores on the ATQ differed significantly between students enrolled in academic majors where one would expect to see differences on altruism (i.e., known-groups validity). This study also broadened the ATQ’s nomological network through additional correlational relationships with different personality traits than previously administered. Together, these studies provide preliminary evidence of construct validity for the ATQ, which can be used to advance the study of the altruistic personality and prosocial tendencies.