Altruism: 33rd percentile. Sympathy: 38th.
I have spent a substantial part of my adult life caring for people. My first instinct was that the test was simply wrong.
It is not wrong. I went back and read the items.
I am concerned about others.
I sympathise with the homeless.
I feel sympathy for those who are worse off than myself.
Every one of them is written about people in general. And my honest answer to all three is no.
My honest answer about the six people inside my circle is that I would do essentially anything.
The instrument has no way to hold both of those, so it asked for one. I gave it the one the question was actually asking for. Then it averaged a distribution I do not have and reported the middle of it.
The rest of the profile says what is going on
Look at the other Agreeableness facets and the picture resolves. Cooperation 71. Dutifulness 87. Morality 90. Modesty 97.
That is a profile organised around duty and code rather than around vicarious feeling. The prosocial behaviour is entirely there. It is conditional, and it runs on obligation rather than on empathy — and a single number for "Altruism" cannot say that.
The part that became the whole project
The differential is not measurement error. In me, on that trait, it is the most descriptively important thing there is, and it is precisely what the instrument discards.
Consider two people who score identically on Altruism. One is consistently, moderately helpful toward everyone. The other is close to zero toward strangers and close to total toward a handful of people. These are not the same person. They will behave differently in almost every situation that matters — in a crisis, in caregiving, in how they form relationships, in where finite attention goes.
A measurement model that cannot tell them apart is not merely imprecise. It is describing somebody who does not exist.
An average at least summarises something. But the standard items are written about people in general, and that phrasing does not blur the second person's two behaviours together — it presupposes that a single general answer exists for them. It does not. So the number is not an imprecise summary of a range. It is an answer to a question they cannot truthfully answer, and it lands on a value they occupy toward nobody.
That is the entire thesis. Everything else on this site is an attempt to measure it without fooling myself.