All humanity is my ingroup: A measure and studies of identification with all humanity.

Abstract

To psychologists Adler (1927/1954) and Maslow (1954), fully mature individuals care deeply for all humanity, not just for their own ingroups. This paper reports a series of studies with a new measure of that caring, the Identification With All Humanity Scale (IWAH). These studies together show that identification with all humanity is more than an absence of ethnocentrism and its correlates and more than the presence of dispositional empathy, moral reasoning, moral identity, and the value of universalism. Across these studies, the IWAH predicted concern for global human rights and humanitarian needs (Studies 1 and 2), was temporally stable (Study 3), and correlated with how close others see one as being (Study 4). The IWAH strongly distinguished members of 2 known groups from a general adult sample (Study 5). It predicted valuing the lives of ingroup and outgroup members equally (Study 7), knowledge of global humanitarian concerns (Study 8) and choosing to learn about these concerns (Study 9), and a willingness to contribute to international humanitarian relief (Study 10). In regression analyses, it predicted these results beyond related constructs. Although psychologists have focused extensively upon negative qualities such as ethnocentrism and its roots, we suggest that the positive quality of identification with all humanity also merits extensive study.

Social Loafing in the Refugee Crisis: Information about Existing Initiatives Decreases Willingness to Help

“…This is in line with previous research regarding empathy as a relevant factor for prosocial behavior [13]. Interestingly, given that we assessed willingness to help people from a different culture, one could conclude that empathic concern does not ask about in-or outgroups [14,15]. For understanding processes of social loafing vis-á-vis helping behavior, the ingroup versus outgroup distinction needs further empirical work.…”

“…According to previous findings, we further assumed increasing effects of descriptive norms as well as social loafing with increasing group size [10]. When testing this idea, we controlled for dispositional empathy [12]-the concern for others and efforts to understand others' views-which is strongly related to helping behavior [13][14][15].…”

The personal and interpersonal rewards of communal orientation

“…In giving care to others across a variety of relationships, we expect that communally oriented people experience associated feelings of love within their close relationships as well as toward people in general or humanity as a whole. Consistent with research documenting that communally oriented people care for others whom they do not know or have never met, such as with strangers and the homeless (Bryan et al, 2000;Clark et al, 1987), and that people can and do indeed experience deep care for humanity as a whole (McFarland, Webb, & Brown, 2012;Sprecher & Fehr, 2005), we sought to investigate whether communally oriented people experience love not only within their close relationships but also more broadly for the human collective.…”

Conceptualizing psychological processes in response to globalization: Components, antecedents, and consequences of global orientations.

“…for example, using the new Bicultural Identity Integration Scale (BIIS-2; Huynh & Benet-Martínez, 2010) to measure the integration of multicultural identities, or the Identification With All Humanity Scale (McFarland, Webb, & Brown, 2012) to measure the concern for global humanity as an ingroup. Gelfan (2010, 2011) suggested that activating both local and global identities would produce positive responses to globalization.…”