Pre-Socratic Understandings of Moral Identity: The Theoretical Infrastructure, Development, Reliability and Validity of the Philotimo Scale

Abstract

The word Philotimo has often been literally translated from Greek to English as ‘love for honour’ or a ‘sense of honour’. This love for honour is described as being a pillar of upholding societal functioning at an optimal level, and an instigator of doing what is right for oneself and others; yet, there is no literature measuring or defining Philotimo. Philotimo is a commitment to unconditional selfless acts that are aligned to a sense of a moral identity; a definition derivative of the literature search and the enquiry of the core principles of Philotimo of the present research. In six studies (N = 1144), the development and validation of the Philotimo Scale is described. In Study 1, Greek participants were asked to rate how much they thought they possessed the trait, which correlated with the total score of the scale, while in Study 2 bilingual Greeks were asked to fill in both versions of the scale with a 2-week interval. Study 3 assessed the reliability of the scale, and Study 4 its stability over time. Study 5 assessed the factor structure, and Study 6 validated the scale against other standardised scales. Together these studies propose a reliable and valid measure that is representative of the Greek sense of Philotimo.