Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale

Understanding the nature and influence of social relationships is of increasing interest to behavioral economists, and behavioral scientists more generally. In turn, this creates a need for tractable, and reliable, tools for measuring fundamental aspects of social relationships. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' (IOS) Scale, a handy pictorial tool for measuring the subjectively perceived closeness of a relationship. The tool is highly portable, very easy for subjects to understand and takes less than 1 minute to administer. Across our three online studies with a diverse adult population (n=772) we show that six different scales designed to measure relationship closeness are all highly significantly positively correlated with the IOS Scale. We then conduct a Principal Component Analysis to construct an Index of Relationship Closeness and find that it correlates very strongly (ρ=.85) with the IOS Scale. We conclude that the IOS Scale is a psychologically meaningful and highly reliable measure of the subjective closeness of relationships

Predicting support for social action: how values, justice-related variables, discrete emotions, and outcome expectations influence support for the Stolen Generations

The Stolen Generations are Indigenous Australians who were taken from their homes by the State and placed in children’s homes or foster care. This study investigated relations between the values held by Non-Indigenous Australians and willingness to support a hypothetical organization set up to repair the damage caused. Participants (N = 235) completed the Schwartz Portrait Values Questionnaire followed by items concerning their perceived responsibility; Indigenous deservingness; feelings of pleasure, anger, guilt, regret, shame, and sympathy; their support for the organization; and how efficacious they expected their support would be. It was found at the bivariate level that support was positively associated with self-transcendence values (universalism, benevolence) and negatively associated with both self-enhancement (power, achievement, hedonism) and security values. A path analysis implied that universalism values influenced support via the justice-related variables of perceived responsibility and undeserved treatment, outcome expectations, negative emotions, and sympathy. This study contributes new information about the effects of values on personal willingness to repair past wrongs.N. T. Feather, Lydia Woodyatt, Ian R. McKe