How Altruistic Are You, in Practice?
Not what you believe about kindness - what you actually do for people
The scale this test comes from did something unusual for its time: instead of asking whether you are a caring person, it asked how often you had done specific things - given directions, donated blood, helped a stranger with a heavy load. Here you get three scores: practical help, giving, and the help you give when nobody will ever find out.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Think of what you have actually done in the last year or two, not what you would like to do. Good intentions do not count here - that is the whole point.
What it measures
Altruism as behaviour: how often you help people, including strangers, at some cost to yourself. It is not empathy, which is what you feel, and not people-pleasing, which is helping in order to be liked - the third bar, help nobody sees, is there partly to tell those apart.
Based on: Self-Report Altruism Scale (Rushton, Chrisjohn & Fekken, 1981)
Possible results
Helping people
Practical help to people around you, including strangers.
Giving
Money, goods, blood or time given to causes and people in need.
Quiet helping
Helping when there is no audience and no credit.
Common questions
Is altruism the same as empathy?
No. Empathy is what you feel when you see someone else's situation; altruism, as this scale measures it, is what you do about it. The two are related, but plenty of empathic people freeze or look away, and plenty of steady helpers act out of habit or principle rather than strong feeling. Quinthea has a separate empathy test if you want to compare.
Does pure altruism really exist?
Philosophers and psychologists still argue about it, since helping usually feels good and that feeling could count as a reward. For practical purposes the argument matters less than it seems: this test measures what people do, and a stranger who gets help does not care whether the helper also felt good. The quiet-helping bar is the closest the test gets to motive, because help without an audience cannot be bought with approval.
Can you be too altruistic?
Yes, when helping starts costing more than you can afford or crowds out the people closest to you. The warning sign is less the amount of help than the reason behind it: helping because you cannot bear to say no is closer to people-pleasing, which Quinthea covers in a separate test. Generous people last longer when they choose where their help goes rather than giving to whoever asks first.
Sources
- Rushton, J. P., Chrisjohn, R. D., & Fekken, G. C. (1981). The altruistic personality and the self-report altruism scale. Personality and Individual Differences. doi:10.1016/0191-8869(81)90084-2
- Manzur, E., & Olavarrieta, S. (2021). The 9-SRA Scale: A simplified 9-items version of the SRA Scale to assess altruism. Sustainability. doi:10.3390/su13136999
- Carlo, G., & Randall, B. A. (2002). The development of a measure of prosocial behaviors for late adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence. doi:10.1023/A:1014033032440
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording adapted from the Self-Report Altruism Scale, so scores are not comparable to its published norms. The original gives a single score; the split into helping and giving follows a shorter 2021 version of the scale, and the third bar, quiet helping, is a related construct from a different measure, not a factor of the original. Self-reports of good deeds lean flattering, and giving depends heavily on money and opportunity.