Agreeableness · Facet A3
Altruism is the part of your make-up that turns somebody else's need into your own business. It measures the pull to give time, effort and attention, not the amount you can afford to give. High scorers move before anyone asks. Low scorers help on a decision rather than on a reflex, and keep their own supplies in sight.
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Altruism in the Big Five records how readily you turn toward another person's problem. The ten statements ask whether you make people feel welcome, whether you are on hand when help is wanted, and whether trouble nearby registers as yours to do something about. What it costs you is never asked.
The facet belongs to Agreeableness, the domain covering how you treat the people around you. Altruism is its active half: Trust describes what you expect of others, this scale what you do about them. It also sits near the middle of its own family, tracking the rest of the domain at 0.64.
Scores describe a standing level rather than a season. Anyone with a sick relative gives more than usual for a while, anyone in a bad month less. This scale describes what you come back to, and for most people that is high: an average of 39.6 out of 50, third highest of all thirty facets.
The scale keeps the name Altruism across the research literature, where the same ground also travels as prosocial disposition or, in survey work, plain generosity. The ten statements are public domain IPIP items assembled by Johnson, not the wording of a commercial inventory.
Three neighbouring ideas get folded into this one, and each fold changes what a high result is actually telling you.
Sympathy is what you feel when somebody is struggling, altruism is whether your hands move. They are the closest pair inside Agreeableness at 0.63, and they still come apart both ways: people who ache for everyone and do little, and people who quietly do a great deal unmoved.
Nothing in these ten statements asks whether you can refuse, whether you run yourself down, or whether the help was wanted. A high score describes a strong pull toward other people, and what you do with that pull is a separate question. Plenty of high scorers guard their calendars closely.
Enjoying company and pitching in are different equipment, though they travel together more than you would guess: this facet tracks Friendliness at 0.59, closer than it stands to Trust at 0.49 or Morality at 0.47. A reserved person can be first to arrive with a van.
Neither end of this scale is the kinder person. One answers faster, the other answers on purpose, and both of them get things carried.
Another person's difficulty registers as work with your name on it, and it registers early, so you are often moving while the room is still deciding. Somebody has to start, and groups settle around people who do. The bill comes quietly: requests find you first, and your own row is watered last.
Helping is a reflex for you: another person’s need registers instantly and your hands respond. Just remember that an empty well waters no gardens.
You help once you have judged that helping is right, which makes what you give solid and rarely resented. Your time and money go where you sent them, not where the noise was loudest. The cost sits at the edges: a small ask that would have cost nothing goes unanswered, because nothing in you jumped.
You help deliberately, not reflexively. Your resources go where you decided they should go, and self-care in your book is not selfishness.
Four people in ten stand in the middle band, and it is a workable place to be. Help goes out when it is asked for and often before, while the size of the ask still gets a glance on the way.
Low, average and high split the sample 30/40/30, the convention Johnson uses for these norms. The bands say where a score sits among other test takers, not what the person holding it is worth. This scale counts a disposition, not merit.
Ten answers add up to a raw score between 10 and 50, and the curve below covers 135,947 finished profiles of the long version. It leans high, harder than almost any other facet.
| Percentile | Raw score |
|---|---|
| 10 | 32 |
| 25 | 37 |
| 50 | 41 |
| 75 | 45 |
| 90 | 48 |
The median is 39 for men and 42 for women, and half of all profiles fall inside an eight point stretch around those middles. A raw 40 is therefore ordinary rather than strong: near the 59th percentile for a man, near the 40th for a woman. The high band opens late, at 43 and 46.
One comparison here is among the wider ones on the site, the other is the quietest movement in this domain apart from Modesty.
Women average 40.8 points and men 38.0, a gap of 2.8 that is the second widest of the six Agreeableness facets, behind Sympathy at 2.9. Age moves the scale far less: men go from 37.7 under 21 to 39.1 past 60, women from 40.4 to 41.6, while the other facets here climb two to five points. About 250 people per sex fill the oldest cell.
Sympathy is the nearest relative at 0.63, the tightest pair anywhere inside Agreeableness. Next comes Friendliness at 0.59, so the second strongest link this facet has lives in another domain, ahead of two of its own sisters.
At work a high score shows up as coverage. You pick up the piece nobody owns and walk the lost newcomer through it, and teams quietly build themselves around that. The price is that such work appears in no job description and eats the hours meant for whatever you are judged on. A low score shows clean edges instead: the commitments are the ones you agreed to, they get done, and colleagues learn not to plan around a rescue.
Close relationships turn the same reflex into a currency. High scorers give first and keep giving, which builds goodwill and can quietly tip a friendship out of balance, since whoever is always the helper never gets helped. Low scorers offer less and mean all of it, so an offer carries weight when it comes. What they miss is the ordinary small favour, which says more to the other person than it costs to give.
At the high end the question is not how to care less, because the pull takes no instructions. It is where the help lands: on whoever asked loudest, or on what you would have chosen with a clear head and a calendar in front of you. At the low end the gain sits in the cheap two minute favour that reads much larger from the other side than it costs from this one.
Start with what stays. Position on this scale barely reshuffles across a decade: whoever gave first at twenty is, on average, still giving first at thirty five. Family and twin research traces close to half of what separates people on Big Five traits to inherited differences, and most of the rest to experience that brothers and sisters never share.
The age curve here is unusually flat. Agreeableness as a whole rises through adulthood, part of the settling researchers call the maturity principle, but this facet adds least to that climb apart from Modesty: about one point from the youngest group to the oldest, against three to five on Morality and Cooperation.
A single number also hides the pairing. High Altruism next to low Assertiveness behaves nothing like the same score next to high Assertiveness. Combinations are the level the paid analysis works on.
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The 300 item version measures Altruism with 10 statements and the 120 item version with 4. The split is even: five of the ten point toward helping and five away from it, and the reversed ones are flipped back before anything is added. The total is read against the norm table for your sex and age band.
Alpha shows how closely the statements of one scale agree with each other. In research, 0.70 and above is usually treated as solid. We counted these numbers on Johnson’s open data, so they can be checked against the published values.
The statements themselves stay off this page. People answer differently once they have read the items and worked out what each is for, so the wording appears after the test starts.
300 questions · about 35 minutes
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Drop the marker where you expect to land on this scale, then answer the statements and compare. This facet sits high, so guessing above average still leaves room above you.
0 means lower than almost everyone who took the test, 100 means higher than almost everyone.
This is a guess, not a measurement. The test compares your answers with norms from real people.
Higher than most people guess. The middle band runs from 36 to 42 for men and from 39 to 45 for women, so a raw 40 sits inside it either way. The high band opens at 43 and 46, and the top tenth at 46 and 48. Generous answers lift every threshold here.
No, though they are the closest pair in this domain at 0.63. Sympathy (A6) asks how much other people’s troubles move you, this scale asks whether anything follows. The averages differ too, 39.6 here against 34.8 on sympathy.
Women average 40.8 in our sample and men 38.0, a gap of 2.8 on a 40 point range. Women come out ahead on all six facets of Agreeableness, and the widest gaps are sympathy and this one. A difference between group averages predicts nothing about a person.
Agreeableness is the domain and altruism one of its six facets, a fairly central one: it tracks the rest of the domain at 0.64, second only to Cooperation. They can still part company, and somebody quick to help lands mid domain if trust and modesty sit low.
Less comfortably than ten can. Alpha works out at 0.837 for the ten statement version and 0.737 for the four statement one, both on the open data published by Johnson. That drop of a tenth is among the ten largest across the thirty facets.
No. The scale counts how automatically you move toward what other people need, not what you value or how you act once you have decided something matters. Low scorers give on purpose, which is why what they give tends to arrive whole.
Ten statements settle this facet in the long test and four in the short one, and the other twenty nine scales come with it either way. No payment, no account, and your percentile appears at the end.
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