Egoism: Concept, measurement and implications for deviance

The conceptualization and development of a measure of egoism - the excessiv e concern with one's own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being - is described. Results from a series of reliability studies ind icated that the Egoism Scale exhibited satisfactory internal consistency in separate samples totalling approximately 2,000 respondents in two countrie s as well as a test-retest correlation of 0.73 over a 9-month interval for a representative sample of the Dutch population. Studies carried out with D utch university students found that egoism shared no more than moderate com mon variance with any of the "Big Five" personality factors, Eysenck's Psyc hoticism factor, the Psychopathic Deviate or the Cynicism scales of the MMP I 2 as well as a nonsignificant correlation with a social desirability meas ure. In addition, the hypothesized pattern of cross-national and gender dif ferences in egoism scores obtained for comparable samples of Dutch and Amer ican university students and, within both cultures, scores exhibited the ex pected pattern of correlations with measures of conceptually linked concept s. Egoism scores were also significantly associated with scores on a variet y of attitudinal and behavioral measures of deviance, including higher scor es on an index of sexual abuse proclivities among male university students, and higher observed frequencies of both running stoplights in Rotterdam an d cheating for personal gain on a laboratory business management task in th e U.S. The potential of egoism as a motivational construct with particular theoretical relevance for deviance is discussed.