Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale
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 compre...
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| Format: | Article |
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Public Library of Science
2015
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| Online Access: | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29121/ |
| _version_ | 1848793719206051840 |
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| author | Gaechter, Simon Starmer, Chris Tufano, Fabio |
| author_facet | Gaechter, Simon Starmer, Chris Tufano, Fabio |
| author_sort | Gaechter, Simon |
| building | Nottingham Research Data Repository |
| collection | Online Access |
| description | 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. |
| first_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:04:46Z |
| format | Article |
| id | nottingham-29121 |
| institution | University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus |
| institution_category | Local University |
| last_indexed | 2025-11-14T19:04:46Z |
| publishDate | 2015 |
| publisher | Public Library of Science |
| recordtype | eprints |
| repository_type | Digital Repository |
| spelling | nottingham-291212020-05-04T17:10:50Z https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29121/ Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale Gaechter, Simon Starmer, Chris Tufano, Fabio 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. Public Library of Science 2015-06-12 Article PeerReviewed Gaechter, Simon, Starmer, Chris and Tufano, Fabio (2015) Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale. PLoS ONE, 10 (6). e0129478. ISSN 1932-6203 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0129478 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129478 doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0129478 |
| spellingShingle | Gaechter, Simon Starmer, Chris Tufano, Fabio Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title | Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title_full | Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title_fullStr | Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title_full_unstemmed | Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title_short | Measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'Inclusion of the Other in the Self' scale |
| title_sort | measuring the closeness of relationships: a comprehensive evaluation of the 'inclusion of the other in the self' scale |
| url | https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29121/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29121/ https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29121/ |