This study examined Humane Orientation in 26 countries worldwide. Humane Orientation refers to the degree to which members of a society are fair, altruistic, friendly, generous, caring and kind to others. Using convenience samples of students we replicated the results from the Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness Program (GLOBE). In our aim to contribute to the construct validation of Humane Orientation we differentiated between Humane Orientation towards in-group members and Humane Orientation towards out-group members, and we related Humane Orientation to other dimensions, namely Agreeableness, Fairness, Welfare State, Religiosity and Authoritarianism. Patriotism was included as a method factor. All measures showed high internal consistency, within-group agreement, and factor equivalence across countries. Convergent validity with other cross-cultural information was examined. Additionally, data was checked for cultural response bias and sequence effects.
Out-Group Humane Orientation showed high variance across countries. In-Group Humane Orientation showed only little variance across countries and was significantly higher than Out-Group Humane Orientation. Humane Orientation was positively related to Agreeableness and to Fairness. Out-Group Humane Orientation was negatively related to Welfare State. Contradicting our hypotheses, Out-Group Humane Orientation was positively related to Religiosity and to Authoritarianism possibly due to the moderating effect of national wealth.
