Ten traits get asked again at four levels of closeness. Four of them are predicted to contract sharply. Three are predicted not to move at all.
Those three are the most important items in the instrument, and they are the ones a reader is most likely to think are filler.
The problem they solve
Suppose I only asked about traits I expected to gate, and they all gated. What would I have learned?
Almost nothing. People answer long questionnaires with habits. Some agree more readily than others; some use the ends of a scale and some cluster in the middle; almost everybody finds it easier to admit low concern for strangers than low concern for family. Any of those produces a tidy downward slope on every trait at once, and it has nothing to do with the construct.
So: Morality, Cooperation and Dutifulness. All three are conduct rules rather than feelings — things you apply because they are your rules, not because of who is in front of you. If they gate as hard as Altruism does, the structural half of this project is false, and I would rather find that out from my own instrument than from a reviewer.
The one that runs backwards
There is a fourth control, and it is the strongest of the four. Anger is predicted to run the other way — expressed more toward the people closest to you, not less.
This is not my observation. Clifton reported in 2014 that people describe themselves as more neurotic with closer others, and the everyday version is obvious once said: most of us are short with family and civil with strangers.
Its value is that no response habit can produce it. Somebody agreeing with everything, or using only the top of the scale, or shading toward the socially acceptable answer, produces slopes that all point the same way. A uniform bias cannot produce opposite-signed slopes. So if the prosocial traits fall and Anger rises in the same person, something trait-specific is happening, and if everything slides the same direction by the same amount, I am measuring a response style and I am wrong.
What the pilot says so far
Eleven people, which is an anecdote rather than a finding, and any number I quote here should be read with that attached.
The steep facets slope. Anger reverses. And the flat controls do not stay flat — they drift downward, less than the steep ones but not by nothing.
If that holds up, it means some share of what this instrument sees is a general "I engage less with people who are further away" factor rather than something specific to any trait. Separating those two is the actual research question, and eleven people cannot do it. It is also, by a distance, the most interesting thing on my list.