Love of Neighbor Assessment: Validity, Reliability, and a Template for Measurement

Tyler VanderWeele^1,2,3*R Noah Padgett^1,3Brendan W Case³Richard Gregory Cowden³Jeffrey Hanson^3,4Christina Hinton³Tim Lomas³Katelyn Long³Ryan Niemiec⁵Jonathan Rutledge³Jonathan Teubner³Sophia Town⁶Renae Wilkinson³Matthew T Lee^3,7

• ¹Department of Epidemiology, School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• ²Department of Biostatistics, School of Public Health, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
• ³Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States
• ⁴New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, United States
• ⁵VIA Institute on Character, Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
• ⁶Fordham University, New York City, New York, United States
• ⁷Baylor University, Waco, Texas, United States

Love of neighbor holds a prominent place in ethical and theological thinking across many cultures and world religious traditions. While arguably central to the promotion of societal wellbeing and human flourishing, little has been done on its empirical assessment. We present a measure of love of neighbor, grounded in a broader conceptual framework concerning interpersonal love, and examine its psychometric properties using cognitive interviews and analyses from datasets from numerous countries, cultures, and contexts. We present evidence for two distinct facets: unitive and contributory neighbor love. We discuss distinctions of unitive and contributory neighbor love from compassionate love, which might be conceived of as contributory neighbor love within the context of suffering. Psychometric properties of the measure concerning consistency, reliability, internal structure, relations between indicators, and 2 measurement invariance are presented. The measure lays the foundation for future empirical 33 study of the distribution, causes, and consequences of love of neighbor.