Based on a large individual differences study, Böckler, Tusche, and Singer aimed to develop and psychometrically evaluate measurement procedures that capture individual differences in multiple facets of human prosociality. Böckler et al. claimed that they identified four reliable and method-independent subcomponents of human prosociality: altruistically motivated prosocial behavior, norm-motivated prosocial behavior, strategically motivated prosocial behavior, and self-reported prosocial behavior. We show that this claim is not supported by the data. The abnormalities of the factor solution are visible in reported standardized loadings much larger than unity and negative residual variances at the indicator level. Additionally, the strong dispersion in factor loadings reported in the article hinders factor interpretation. We reanalyze the correlation matrices and propose a model with one overarching prosociality factor and a specific factor for game-theoretical conflicts. This simpler model is a more sustainable representation of prosocial behavior.
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