Note: I suggest not reading this comment until you've taken the survey.
Maybe some of this is intentional, but I found this really hard to answer. I appreciate your work with the definitions but they don't seem to point to clear categories to me. Eg you said "NON-ALTRUISTIC makes little determined effort to help others, beyond voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar".
But if you make impulse donations at the checkout, that means you donate less than 1% of your income to charity. If you use someone's pronouns or avoid slurs out of ordinary kindness and decency, you're trying to avoid using problematic language. If you throw something in the recycling box because that's what everyone else does and you don't want to look inconsiderate, you're recycling. All three of these are in the definition that suggests this makes someone altruistic, and I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone who doesn't do them.
Also I feel like volunteering intermittently is a much much stronger signal of someone's intentions to be kind, compared to recycling or trying to avoid problematic language.
I have ended up ticking 'altruistic' for every single group mentioned including myself, even though I started off thinking I would qualify as very altruistic for having taken the 10% pledge. It doesn't really match my feeling, but the definitions you provided boxed me in.
Additionally I felt silly filling out options like 'Your siblings', 'Your primary romantic partner', 'Your religious leader' etc when those are people who don't exist in my case. I guess you didn't want to give people an 'n/a' option in case they used it as a proxy for 'I don't know how to evaluate this group of people'.
Seems strange that it's quite easy to meet the criteria for extremely altruistic without meeting the criteria for very altruistic. Like you just donate a kidney OR be a foster parent and do nothing else. It seems worse than donating 9%, being vegan, AND volunteering 10 hours per week.
Note: I suggest not reading this comment until you've taken the survey.
Maybe some of this is intentional, but I found this really hard to answer. I appreciate your work with the definitions but they don't seem to point to clear categories to me. Eg you said "NON-ALTRUISTIC makes little determined effort to help others, beyond voting, ordinary kindness and decency to those around them, impulse donations at the grocery store checkout, and similar".
But if you make impulse donations at the checkout, that means you donate less than 1% of your income to charity. If you use someone's pronouns or avoid slurs out of ordinary kindness and decency, you're trying to avoid using problematic language. If you throw something in the recycling box because that's what everyone else does and you don't want to look inconsiderate, you're recycling. All three of these are in the definition that suggests this makes someone altruistic, and I'm pretty sure I don't know anyone who doesn't do them.
Also I feel like volunteering intermittently is a much much stronger signal of someone's intentions to be kind, compared to recycling or trying to avoid problematic language.
I have ended up ticking 'altruistic' for every single group mentioned including myself, even though I started off thinking I would qualify as very altruistic for having taken the 10% pledge. It doesn't really match my feeling, but the definitions you provided boxed me in.
Additionally I felt silly filling out options like 'Your siblings', 'Your primary romantic partner', 'Your religious leader' etc when those are people who don't exist in my case. I guess you didn't want to give people an 'n/a' option in case they used it as a proxy for 'I don't know how to evaluate this group of people'.
Seems strange that it's quite easy to meet the criteria for extremely altruistic without meeting the criteria for very altruistic. Like you just donate a kidney OR be a foster parent and do nothing else. It seems worse than donating 9%, being vegan, AND volunteering 10 hours per week.