Consistency Among Humanitarian and Helping Attitudes

Five attitudes were defined factorially from subjects' responses (n = 489) to a 91-item inventory covering a variety of altruistic themes and attitude objects. Helping, social-responsibility, and procriminal factors were moderately associated; nontraditional humanitarian (mainly sex progressivism) and pro-animal factors had weak, although significant, correlations with other attitudes. Women expressed greater altruism than men, except on nontraditional humanitarianism (reversal significant at p <.0001). Subjects who scored low on Dogmatism and F Scales were more consistent than dogmatic (authoritarian) Ss, according to two statistics: (a) an individual dispersion index reflecting amount of spread among the five attitude scores (pro-con dimension); (b) correlational differences between authoritarian and non-authoritarian subgroups, for all 10 attitude pairs. Applicability of the consistency principle to status quo attitude organization was discussed.