Egoism: Concept, measurement and implications for deviance

The conceptualization and development of a measure of egoism - the excessive concern with one's own pleasure or advantage at the expense of community well-being - is described. Results from a series of reliability studies indicated that the Egoism Scale exhibited satisfactory internal consistency in separate samples totalling approximately 2,000 respondents in two countries 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 Dutch university students found that egoism shared no more than moderate common variance with any of the "Big Five" personality factors, Eysenck's Psychoticism factor, the Psychopathic Deviate or the Cynicism scales of the MMPl 2 as well as a nonsignificant correlation with a social desirability measure. In addition, the hypothesized pattern of cross-national and gender differences in egoism scores obtained for comparable samples of Dutch and American university students and, within both cultures, scores exhibited the expected pattern of correlations with measures of conceptually linked concepts. Egoism scores were also significantly associated with scores on a variety of attitudinal and behavioral measures of deviance, including higher scores on an index of sexual abuse proclivities among male university students, and higher observed frequencies of both running stoplights in Rotterdam and cheating for personal gain on a laboratory business management task in the U.S. The potential of egoism as a motivational construct with particular theoretical relevance for deviance is discussed.