Measuring the Closeness of Relationships: A Comprehensive Evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' Scale

Simon Gächter · Chris Starmer · Fabio Tufano

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Attachment and Relationship Dynamics Psychometric Methodologies and Testing Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion

Abstract

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.

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2003A very brief measure of the Big-Five personality domains 1992Inclusion of Other in the Self Scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness.1982An experimental analysis of ultimatum bargaining 2003The nature of human altruism 2000Fairness and Retaliation: The Economics of Reciprocity 2024Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology 2014Handbook of Research Methods in Social and Personality Psychology 1991Close relationships as including other in the self.

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