Using semantic similarity to understand the psychological constructs related to prosociality

Abstract

Prosociality (measured with economic games) is correlated with individual differences in psychological constructs (measured with self-report scales). We review how methods from natural language processing, a subfield of computer science focused on processing natural text, can be applied to understand the semantic content of scales measuring psychological constructs correlated with prosociality. Methods for clustering language and assessing similarity between text documents can be used to assess the novelty (or redundancy) of new scales, to understand the overlap among different psychological constructs, and to compare different measures of the same construct. These examples illustrate how natural language processing methods can augment traditional survey- and game-based approaches to studying individual differences in prosociality.

Keywords: Individual differences; Natural language processing; Prosocial behavior.