Measuring Prosociality: The Development of a Prosocial Behavioral Intentions Scale

Prosociality is a critical issue in behavioral research. In this investigation, we developed a measure of prosocial behavioral intentions. Qualitative responses from two surveys (n = 465) and items from existing measures were used to generate a list of prosocial behaviors in which people might intend to engage. We factor analyzed responses to these items (n = 319) and retained the most common and representative items. The new measure demonstrated adequate internal consistency (n = 247, 147; α = .81, .83); convergent validity with past prosocial behavior (r = .51, .43), moral identity (r = .50, .55), and materialism (r = –.30, –.20). The instrument also predicted prosocial behavior while controlling for a prior measure of prosocial intentions, Exp(B) = 1.99, Wald = 10.59, p = .001, thereby demonstrating incremental predictive validity. This 4-item scale could be used across contexts to advance the study of prosociality.     

An Empirically Keyed Scale for Measuring Managerial Attitudes Toward Women Executives

A scale (MATWES) is presented providing reliability and some validity measures regarding managerial attitudes toward women executives. Methodology used demonstrates an empirical approach to scale development through the employment of a projective test for item generation and the use of a panel of women executives who served as Q-sorters to select the items. The use of the Scale as a research instrument and its value in minimizing researcher bias in its construction are discussed.     

The Social Roles Questionnaire: A New Approach to Measuring Attitudes Toward Gender

Innovative research is constrained by instruments that assume gender to be captured by dichotomous categories. This article presents the results of two studies that document the psychometric properties of the Social Roles Questionnaire (SRQ), a new measure of gender role attitudes. A social constructivist perspective guided the development of the instrument that was designed not only to capture the diversity in people’s thinking about social roles for men and women, but also to identify attitudes that transcend binary categories. The article details the process of assessing reliability and validity based on data from 414 undergraduates. Findings revealed the SRQ is reliable and valid and that women were more likely than men to endorse egalitarian and gender transcendent beliefs. Additional possible uses of the SRQ are discussed.     

Getting Emotional About Explanations: Social Explanations and Social Explanatory Styles as Bases of Prosocial Emotions and Intergroup Attitudes

We are interested in the bases of social emotions such as compassion and hostility. Our analysis centers on social explanations, or people’s answers to the question: Why does the target behave that way or experience those outcomes? Below, we review classic approaches to social explanation and then review work linking explanations to emotions. Finally, we focus on work from our lab that connects explanations to prosocial emotions and intergroup attitudes, including compassion for the disadvantaged and reduced vengefulness toward the violent. A crucial contribution of our work is to illuminate complex connections between explanations and emotions: A given explanation has different socio‐emotional implications depending on the explainer’s motives. Finally, we review our work suggesting that individuals have social explanatory styles, and that particular styles are predictive of dispositional compassion. A key implication of our work is that social explanations are another basis of prosociality, in addition to factors such as empathy and moral principles.     

Responsibility for Future Climate Justice: The Direct Responsibility to Mitigate Structural Injustice for Future Generations

In this article we argue that duties towards future generations are situated on the collective level and that they should be understood in terms of collective responsibility for structural injustice. In the context of climate change, it seems self-evident that our moral duties pertain not only to the current generation but to future generations as well. However, conceptualizing this leads to the non-identity problem: future persons cannot be harmed by present-day choices because they would not have existed if other choices had been made. Recently, Charlotte Franziska Unruh has proposed a solution that places the duties not on the individual level but on the collective level. The current generation has a responsibility for future generations as a whole. This solution is promising, but we argue that it problematically overlooks the existence of unjust relations within the contemporary collective, as we all contribute differently to bringing future generations into existence. Therefore, we propose to graft Iris Marion Young's Social Connection Model, which is concerned with structural injustice, on to the discussion of responsibility for future generations. Our proposal incorporates the strengths of Unruh's arguments, while also allowing for a differentiated responsibility based on different implications in unjust structures.     

Development and Validation of a Scale Measuring Attitudes Toward Smoking

Abstract

The authors developed the Smoking Attitudes Scale (SAS) and administered it to 2 samples of U.S. students who were smokers or nonsmokers. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis with LISREL (K. G. Jöreskog & D. Sörbom, 1989) methodology revealed that the SAS consists of 4 factors. The overall instrument possesses good internal consistency and adequate construct validity as well.     

社会排斥与亲社会行为的关系：物质主义价值观与未来取向的作用

为考察社会排斥影响亲社会行为的心理机制及其边界条件,研究1采用cyberball范式操纵社会排斥,考察其对物质主义价值观和亲社会行为的影响;研究2采用回忆范式操纵社会排斥,并进一步考察了未来取向在社会排斥与亲社会行为的关系中的调节作用。研究结果表明：社会排斥可以负向预测亲社会行为,物质主义价值观在社会排斥对亲社会行为的预测中起部分中介作用,未来取向在社会排斥和亲社会行为之间起调节作用。研究结果揭示了社会排斥导致物质主义价值观水平升高,进而减少亲社会行为,而未来取向可以降低社会排斥对亲社会行为的负面影响。     

主观社会阶层对亲社会行为的影响

从特质性的主观阶层感和情境性的主观阶层感两个角度考察了主观社会阶层对个体亲社会行为的影响。实验1采用问卷调查法,发现主观社会阶层较高的被试在人际关系取向上更倾向于共享关系取向。实验2采用材料启动法,发现对社会距离近的他人,高阶层与低阶层利他行为差异不显著;对社会距离远的他人,高阶层的利他行为显著大于低阶层组。研究结论：主观社会阶层较高的个体表现出更多的亲社会行为;社会距离起调节作用。     

社会阶层与亲社会行为：回报预期的调节作用

近年来关于社会阶层和亲社会行为关系的研究不少,但结论不一致。基于此,本研究假设亲社会行为的社会阶层差异可能与对回报水平的预期有关。实验改编自“独裁者”游戏,通过网络模拟情境进行,采用2（社会阶层：高、低）×2（回报预期：高、低）的混合设计（其中社会阶层为被试间变量）,考察了不同社会阶层被试在两种不同回报预期条件下,亲社会行为的差异。实验结果表明：回报预期和社会阶层之间存在交互作用,进一步的简单效应分析表明,当预期目标有较高的回报水平时,高低社会阶层的亲社会行为差异不显著。当预期目标有较低的回报水平时,与高社会阶层相比,低社会阶层的亲社会行为明显减少。说明回报预期对不同社会阶层的亲社会行为起显著的调节作用。     

Positive Social Pressure and Prosocial Motivation: Evidence from a Large‐Scale Field Experiment on Voter Mobilization

Political scientists are increasingly exploring the psychological underpinnings of voting behavior using field experimental techniques. Research in psychology demonstrates that positive reinforcement—what I describe as positive social pressure—motivates prosocial behavior. A distinctive feature of the current study is the focus on key subgroups of voters, namely unmarried women and minorities. Attention to these voter subgroups allows us to build upon findings reported in previous studies that leave questions about the generalizability of the reported effects of positive social pressure to key demographic subgroups of voters largely unanswered. This article reports the results of a large‐scale randomized field experiment designed to investigate the impact of positive social pressure on voter turnout. The experiment was conducted during the November 2009 gubernatorial election in New Jersey, and the results suggest positive social pressure mobilizes voters. Moreover, the effects appear to be robust across subgroups of voters, including minorities and unmarried women, and both lower‐ and higher‐propensity voters.     

Idolatry and Future Generations: the Persistence of Molech

Drawing on the work of Jewish text scholars and the philosophy of Levinas and Rosenzweig, this article uses the biblical texts on Molech, and issues in their interpretation, as the starting‐point for an analysis of the intergenerational structure of idolatry. In the context of attention to this structure, and to the particular implications of this for Christians as “Gentiles”, the death of Jesus can be read in ways that subvert the patterns of the Molech cult.     

A Scale for Measuring Persistence

Summary

The effectiveness of a white expert (psychologist) and that of a peer in influencing Negro mothers of low socioeconomic status were compared. Each subject was given advice by the expert after her young child had been evaluated by him. Subjects then received a positive, neutral, or negative opinion of the expert's advice from a confederate peer. Results indicated that the expert was more effective than the peer. While both sources had a significant immediate effect, the expert was also significantly influential in having subjects act after having left the testing situation. It was concluded that expertness was the strongest factor, even though other factors like race and referent-group membership might have worked against it.     

Prosocial Attitudes toward Money from Terror Management Perspective: Death Transcendence through Spirituality

Based on Terror Management Theory (TMT), we suggest that spirituality and prosocial attitudes toward money have a similar defensive function in resisting existential anxiety. In mortality salient (MS) situations, both spirituality and prosocial money attitudes afford symbolic immortality by self-transcendent connections. In four studies, we found that activating death awareness weakened people’s subjective love of money (Study 1) and predicted increased spending willingness on prosocial rather than proself goals (Studies 2, 3, and 4). More importantly, MS effects on money attitudes were smaller when people’s trait spirituality was high (vs. low; Studies 1, 2, 3) and when people were primed to experience spirituality (vs. happiness control condition; Study 4). For low spirituality people, the association between MS and prosocial spending also depended on the capacity of money spending to contribute positively to one’s feelings of self-worth (Study 3). Theoretical implications and future directions are discussed.     

Measuring Religious Attitudes in Secularized Western European Context: A Psychometric Analysis of the Post-Critical Belief Scale

Wulff's two-dimensional model of approaches to religion was an inspiration for the development of the Post-Critical Belief Scale (PCBS), an instrument measuring religious attitudes, that is, “paradigms of religious belief structure” in a secularized Western European context. The scale has been frequently used in psychological studies, has undergone psychometric analyses and modifications, and has been translated into several languages. The current study shows results of a psychometric analysis of the component structure of PCBS in different age groups over time using Clusterwise Simultaneous Component Analysis-Equal Cross-Product (SCA-ECP). The analysis was based on samples collected in Flanders (Belgium; N = 14,599). The one-cluster and two-cluster models yielded three components: Literal Affirmation, Literal Disaffirmation, and Symbolic Attitude, and there were no differences between age groups. In the two-cluster model, subtle differences between samples collected before and after 2002 were found, and these were related to two PCBS items referring to interpretation of Biblical stories. Our finding of a generalized Symbolic Attitude might be related to the changes in the approaches to religion in secularized Western Europe, and might capture the religious (dis-)belief of individuals who are open and tolerant to other religious systems, or alternatively, have become indifferent to them. Further cross-cultural and longitudinal studies are needed to better understand the religious attitudes in a secularized context, and the development of a new scale based on the paradigm of personal meaning systems is suggested     

The GFIT Scale: Measuring Goals Following Interpersonal Transgressions

In two studies, we created and validated a scale assessing 12 possible goals that individuals might wish to pursue when transgressed against by another person (e.g., relationship maintenance, power over the offender, retributive justice). Results demonstrated that the 12 subscales of the Goals Following Interpersonal Transgressions scale (GFIT) were reliable and exhibited convergent and discriminant validity with transgression-related interpersonal motivations (i.e., the TRIM), and relevant personality traits (i.e., the Dark Triad). Additional analyses revealed that the structure of the scale was robust across different kinds of transgressions and for differing relationships between victim and offender. We argue that the GFIT is a versatile scale with several advantages over existing measures.