Fantasy

Fantasy is the subscale of Davis's (1983) Interpersonal Reactivity Index measuring the tendency to imaginatively transpose oneself into the feelings and actions of fictitious characters in books, movies, and plays. The seven items administered here are the verbatim subscale as hosted in the public-domain IPIP catalog.

As with the other IRI subscales on this platform, responses are coded 1–5 rather than the published 0–4, so the reference mean in the norms section carries an exact +7 shift with the standard deviation unchanged.

“I daydream and fantasize, with some regularity, about things that might happen to me.”

Illustrative only. During administration items are presented one screen-set at a time; response-key direction is never shown to respondents.

Item responses are summed within each scale (reverse-keyed items recoded first) and expressed as a population percentile against the cited reference sample, with a reliability-based confidence range where α is published.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126 — U.S. college student validation sample (N = 1,161; 579 male, 582 female), verbatim 7-item Fantasy subscale. Published sex-stratified figures: males M = 15.73, SD = 5.6; females M = 18.75, SD = 5.17 (0–4 response coding, sum 0–28). This site administers the identical items and anchors coded 1–5 (sum 7–35), so the reference mean is shifted by exactly +7; an additive shift leaves the SD unchanged. The combined reference values are pooled exactly from the published sex-stratified figures (M = 24.24, SD = 5.59 on the 7–35 metric). The confidence range uses the standard error of measurement (SEM = SD·√(1−α)) from the published per-subscale standardized Cronbach’s α (Davis, 1980; males .78, females .79 — the lower bound is used for the widest, most conservative range).

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. Items hosted at ipip.ori.org.