A correlational study in altruism and self-esteem

1. Altruism and Self Esteem
By: Cameron Aaron and Mikaela Marinis

2. Who is Cameron Aaron?
Computer Science and Psychology Major w/minor in Cognitive
Science
Ammerman Student
Software Engineer @ Microsoft’s GitHub
Google Product Expert
Fun fact: I once snuck into a robotics competition

3. Who is Mikaela Marinis?
Computer Science Major
Software Engineer @ Tangen Biosciences LLC
Fun fact: Used to make pot holders for charity

4. Literature Review
● Both altruism and self-esteem are correlated to philanthropic behavior
● Being on the receiving end of altruism positively impacts one’s self-esteem
● There is a wide variety of research on the (negative) effects of being bullied
on one’s self-esteem, but there is a small pool of research on the self-esteem
of a bully (the latter has produced inconsistent results)
● Studies looking at altruism tend to rely on the Self-Report Altruism Scale
(1981)

5. Relevant Theories
● Psychological Egoism ● Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

6. Hypothesis
● Those with lower self-esteem will have higher rates of altruism and vice
versa, in accordance with the theory of psychological egoism and Maslow’s
Hierarchy of needs

7. Materials and Methods
● ALTRUISTIC PERSONALITY SCALE(21 Questions) Cronbach's alpha= .538
- The 1981 scale as described prior, based on behavior
● SOCIAL VALUES ORIENTATION (SVO)(10 Questions Cronbach's alpha = .1
- Social value orientation is an individual’s preference towards the allocation of money between
themselves and someone else. It corresponds to how much someone cares about the welfare
of others compared to themselves.
● PHILOSOPHIES OF HUMAN NATURE ALTRUISM SCALE(15 Questions) Cronbach's alpha = .8
- Measures how people altruistic people view humans in general, correlates with how altruistic
people are themselves
● ROSENBERG SELF-ESTEEM SCALE(11 Questions) Cronbach's alpha =.7
- A well respected and widely used scale for measuring individual self-esteem and finding
problematically low self-esteem
● SOCIAL DESIRABILITY SCALE (33 Questions) Cronbach's alpha =.2
- We used this scale to account for the fact that many people may want to appear more altruistic
to the experimenters

8. Materials and Methods (cont.)
Qualtrics Survey Method
Two Tailed Study Multiple Regression

9. Results

10. Results
Multiple regression analysis was used to test if our measures of altruism
significantly predicted participants' ratings of self-esteem. The results of the
regression indicated the two predictors explained 4.4% of the variance (R2 =.044,
F(3,83)=1.28, p=.285>.05). It was found that self-esteem did not significantly
predict social values orientation (β = -.07, p=.5), Philosophy of Human Nature (β
=0.07, p=.9), Altruism scale (β =.2, p=.07)

11. Discussion and Next Steps
● No significant correlation was found
● Hypothesis not supported, if anything, there was an (insignificant) positive
correlation
● In the future, if we were to conduct a similar study, we would like to:
- Measure to see if there is a positive correlation between self-esteem and
altruism (one tailed)
- Larger sample size
- More diverse sample size
- Behavioral observation study

12. Questions?