Helpfulness categorized within a culture

The personal disposition to be helpful is most validly measured within a culture in terms of locally recognized categories of helping activity. This paper illustrates the collection and categorization of a corpus of actual incidents of Good Samaritanism, recounted by recruits in public places. The frequency with which an individual executes a particular sort of helpful activity can be estimated from the recalled date of the most recent incident. Helping category frequencies provide a behavioral measure of individual differences in present helpfulness. In addition, categories share several situational characteristics that may influence the decision to help. This opens up the prospect of a cognitive psychometrics of helping. Furthermore, questionnaire experiments can provide causal analyses of an individual’s empathic perception, sympathetic emotion and compassionate intention within the specified physical and social circumstances of a particular cooperative activity.