The Identification with All Humanity Scale (IWAHS)<\/strong> is a premier psychometric instrument developed by Sam McFarland<\/a>, Derek Brown, and Matthew Webb to assess the degree to which individuals feel psychological kinship, moral concern, and social belonging with the global human collective. Distinct from standard measures of local or national patriotism, the IWAHS systematically contrasts attachment to one’s immediate community, one’s country (e.g., Americans), and the global collective of all human beings. Composed of 9 stem items evaluated across three distinct comparative targets\u2014yielding 27 total ratings\u2014the instrument operationalizes emotional closeness, self-categorization (use of the collective pronoun “we”), perceived commonality, family-like bond, emotional identification, empathic concern during humanitarian crises, global citizenship aspirations, loyalty, and willingness to provide humanitarian aid. Measured along standardized five-point Likert scales<\/a> with tailored response anchors across item stems, the instrument demonstrates exemplary psychometric properties. Across international samples, the Identification with All Humanity (IWAH) dimension exhibits high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α<\/a> typically ranging from .86 to .93), robust test-retest stability, and distinct construct validity. Confirmatory factor analytic investigations consistently support a three-factor oblique or bifactor structural representation, delineating global identification from local and national identifications. Crucially, IWAHS serves as an indispensable predictive metric in social, political, and cross-cultural psychology, demonstrating substantial predictive validity for support for universal human rights<\/a>, global humanitarian assistance, international environmental agreements, and resistance to ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and militaristic foreign policies.<\/p>\n Identification with All Humanity, IWAHS, global identity, cosmopolitanism, social identity theory, pro-social behavior, human rights orientation, ethnocentrism, psychometrics, universalism<\/p>\n The Identification with All Humanity Scale was originated and developed by Sam McFarland<\/strong>, Ph.D., alongside Derek Brown<\/strong> and Matthew Webb<\/strong> within the Department of Psychology at Western Kentucky University<\/a>, Bowling Green, Kentucky, USA. Dr. Sam McFarland, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, has devoted decades of empirical scholarship to investigating the psychological antecedents of human rights advocacy, prejudice reduction, authoritarianism, and global social responsibility. Derek Brown and Matthew Webb contributed substantially to the early empirical conceptualization, item development, and psychometric validation of the scale across successive community and collegiate research programs.<\/p>\n The primary purpose of the Identification with All Humanity Scale is to quantitatively capture an expansive level of social identification that transcends geocentrism, ethnocentrism, and national boundary lines. Historically, psychological literature possessed robust paradigms for assessing ingroup favoritism, national attachment, patriotism, and outgroup derogation (e.g., via Right-Wing Authoritarianism<\/a> and Social Dominance Orientation<\/a>). However, quantitative paradigms lacked a refined, psychometrically validated scale capable of measuring the genuine psychological sense of belonging to humankind as a superordinate collective.<\/p>\n The theoretical rationale behind the IWAHS addresses the need to isolate universal human identification from simple local affiliation or nationalistic pride. By presenting identical psychological dimensions across three nested ecological levels\u2014one’s local community, one’s nation, and humanity as a whole\u2014the instrument allows researchers to disconfirm whether global concern is merely an artifact of general sociability or a unique, superordinate social identification. In academic research, the instrument is employed to investigate the psychological underpinnings of peace, global solidarity, cross-cultural empathy, and commitment to international justice. In political science and macro-level sociology, the scale is utilized to analyze public policy preferences regarding international foreign aid, acceptance of refugees<\/a>, climate change treaties, and adherence to international humanitarian law. In educational and intervention settings, the scale serves as a benchmark metric to evaluate the effectiveness of global citizenship curricula, international human rights education programs, and intergroup contact interventions designed to reduce intergroup hostility.<\/p>\n The core construct measured by the IWAHS is Identification with All Humanity (IWAH)<\/strong>, defined as a deep, affective, cognitive, and behavioral orientation toward seeing oneself as an integral part of the worldwide human community. McFarland, Webb, and Brown conceptualized this construct not as abstract idealism or dispassionate cosmopolitan philosophy, but as an active, multidimensional social identity. Within the architecture of the IWAHS, this superordinate identification is evaluated alongside two comparative targets:<\/p>\n The psychological construct encompasses several foundational facets operationalized across the 9 stem items:<\/p>\n The theoretical architecture of the IWAHS draws upon and synthesizes three major traditions within psychological science:<\/p>\n Drawing on Social Identity Theory<\/a> (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and Self-Categorization Theory<\/a> (Turner et al., 1987), human identity operates across hierarchical levels of abstraction. Turner postulated three primary levels of self-categorization: the subordinate personal self (individual uniqueness), the intermediate social self (intragroup categorizations such as nationality, ethnicity, or gender), and the superordinate human self (categorization of self as a human being contrasting with other forms of life). Historically, social identity theorists assumed that superordinate categorizations were cognitively unstable, too abstract, or functionally secondary compared to salient national or ethnic identities. McFarland and colleagues overturned this assumption, establishing that the superordinate human categorization can exist as a stable, individual-differences trait characterized by rich emotional, moral, and behavioral components.<\/p>\n The concept of identifying with all humanity directly operationalizes Alfred Adler’s foundational construct of Gemeinschaftsgefühl<\/a><\/em> (social interest, or feeling of community), which Adler characterized as a profound sense of oneness with all living humanity. Similarly, Abraham Maslow<\/a> posited that self-actualizing individuals possess a genuine desire to help the human race, exhibiting deep feelings of identification, sympathy, and affection for mankind as if all people were members of a single family. The IWAHS operationalizes these long-standing humanistic insights into a psychometrically rigorous, empirical instrument.<\/p>\n In the framework of Shalom Schwartz’s theory of basic human values, Universalism<\/em> represents the motivational goal of understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection for the welfare of all people and for nature. Identification with all humanity represents an advanced expansion of the moral circle<\/a> (as conceptualized by Peter Singer). When an individual identifies with humanity, moral boundaries expand beyond the proximate tribe or nation-state, minimizing psychological distance and nullifying the “us versus them” dichotomy that traditionally fuels dehumanization, ethnocentrism, and outgroup derogation.<\/p>\n Extensive psychometric investigations across diverse international, collegiate, and representative community cohorts provide compelling evidence for the construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the IWAHS.<\/p>\n Convergent validity is demonstrated by robust, theoretically coherent correlations with established social-psychological and dispositional constructs. Scores on the IWAH subscale correlate significantly and positively with:<\/p>\n Crucially, IWAH demonstrates distinct discriminant validity from simple community or national identification. When community and national identification are statistically controlled, IWAH continues to uniquely predict outcomes, confirming that it is not merely an epiphenomenon of high sociability or general patriotism. Furthermore, IWAH exhibits moderate to strong negative correlations with constructs assessing group-based dominance and prejudice:<\/p>\n The IWAHS possesses substantial predictive validity across behavioral and policy domains. In empirical investigations, individuals scoring high on IWAH:<\/p>\n The reliability of the IWAHS has been rigorously demonstrated across numerous empirical studies involving both American and cross-national populations (including European, Latin American, Asian, and Middle Eastern cohorts).<\/p>\n Across validation studies conducted by McFarland et al. (2012) and independent international replications, the 9-item IWAH subscale consistently demonstrates exceptional internal consistency reliability:<\/p>\n Corrected item-total correlations for the IWAH subscale items consistently exceed .50, with the vast majority falling between .60 and .78, indicating high item homogeneity without excessive redundancy.<\/p>\n Temporal stability assessments have confirmed that IWAH functions as an enduring socio-cognitive orientation rather than a transient, fluctuating mood state. Over intervals ranging from two weeks to six months, test-retest reliability coefficients (r<\/em>tt<\/sub>) routinely fall between .75 and .84<\/strong>, confirming substantial longitudinal stability in non-interventional conditions.<\/p>\n The underlying factor structure of the IWAHS has been extensively evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)<\/a> across diverse linguistic adaptations and demographic cohorts.<\/p>\n Structural evaluations test several competing models:<\/p>\n Typical fit indices for the correlated three-factor structural model in empirical research meet strict psychometric cutoffs:<\/p>\n Standardized factor loadings on the primary latent IWAH dimension are uniformly high, with all 9 items loading above .60, and several items (notably Stem 5: identification\/concern, Stem 6: caring when bad things happen, and Stem 9: desire to help) displaying standardized loadings exceeding .75 to .85.<\/p>\n The technical administration details and structural format of the IWAHS are outlined below:<\/p>\n The Identification with All Humanity Scale was first formally presented in early empirical validation studies by Sam McFarland and Derek Brown in 2008 and comprehensively published in the landmark paper by McFarland, Webb, and Brown in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology<\/em> in 2012<\/strong>. The instrument is considered an open-access psychometric tool for non-commercial academic, scientific, and educational research. No licensing fees or prior formal permissions are required for non-profit academic research, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution and formal citation are given to the original authors. For commercial applications, organizational consulting assessments, or revenue-generating software implementations, researchers must contact Dr. Sam McFarland or Western Kentucky University to secure written authorization.<\/p>\n A comprehensive academic guide and psychometric analysis of the Identification with All Humanity Scale (IWAHS), developed by Sam McFarland and colleagues to assess global identification, empathy, and humanitarian commitment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[858,2,79],"tags":[420,3266,692,2330,3275,16992,16990,16991,1503,490],"class_list":["post-5159","psych_scale","type-psych_scale","status-publish","hentry","category-personality-assessment","category-psychometrics","category-social-psychology","tag-altruism","tag-cosmopolitanism","tag-cross-cultural-psychology","tag-empathy","tag-global-identity","tag-human-rights","tag-identification-with-all-humanity-scale","tag-iwahs","tag-psychometric-properties","tag-social-identity-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/5159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/psych_scale"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/psych_scale\/5159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashadocs.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Keywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
Purpose<\/h2>\n
Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
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Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
1. Self-Categorization and Social Identity Theory<\/h3>\n
2. Humanistic Psychology and Gemeinschaftsgefühl<\/h3>\n
3. Universalism and the Moral Circle<\/h3>\n
Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Convergent Validity<\/h3>\n
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Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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Predictive and Ecological Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
Internal Consistency<\/h3>\n
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Test-Retest Stability<\/h3>\n
Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Structure<\/h3>\n
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Model Fit Indices and Factor Loadings<\/h3>\n
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Instrument \/ Measurement Tool<\/h2>\n
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Permissions & Fee and Test Year<\/h2>\n
References<\/h2>\n
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13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)<\/h2>\n