Social value orientations
Social value orientations
In social psychology, social value orientation (SVO) is a person's preference about how to allocate resources (e.g. money) between the self and another person. SVO corresponds to how much weight a person attaches to the welfare of others in relation to the own. Since people are assumed to vary in the weight they attach to other peoples' outcomes in relation to their own, SVO is an individual difference variable. The general concept underlying SVO has become widely studied in a variety of different scientific disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and biology under a multitude of different names (e.g. social preferences, other-regarding preferences, welfare tradeoff ratios, social motives, etc.).
Historical background The SVO construct has its history in the study of interdependent decision making, i.e. strategic interactions between two or more people. The advent of game-theory in the 1940s provided a formal language for describing and analyzing situations of interdependence based on utility theory. As a simplifying assumption for analyzing strategic interactions, it was generally presumed that people only consider their own outcomes when making decisions in interdependent situations, rather than taking into account the interaction partners' outcomes as well. However, the study of human behavior in social dilemma situations, such as the prisoner's-dilemma, revealed that some people do in fact appear to have concerns for others.
In the prisoner's-dilemma, participants are asked to take the role of two criminals. In this situation, they are to pretend that they are a pair of criminals being interrogated by detectives in separate rooms. Both participants are being offered a deal and have two options. That is, the participant may remain silent or confess and implicate his or her partner. However, if both participants choose to remain silent, they will be set free. If both participants confess they will receive a moderate sentence. Conversely, if one participant remains silent while the other confesses, the person who confesses will receive a minimal sentence while the person who remained silent (and was implicated by their partner) will receive a maximum sentence. Thus, participants have to make the decision to cooperate with or compete with their partner.
When used in the lab, the dynamics of this situation are stimulated as participants play for points or for money. Participants are given one of two choices, labeled option C or D. Option C would be the cooperative choice and if both participants choose to be cooperative then they will both earn points or money. On the other hand, Option D is the competitive choice. If just one participants chooses option D, that participant will earn points or money while the other player will lose money. However, if both participant pick D, then both of them will lose money. In addition to displaying participant's social value orientations, it also displays the dynamics of a mixed-motives situation.
From behavior in strategic situations it is not possible, though, to infer peoples' motives, i.e. the joint outcome they would choose if they alone could determine it. The reason is that behavior in a strategic situation is always a function of both peoples' preferences about joint outcomes and their beliefs about the intentions and behavior of their interaction partners.
In an attempt to assess peoples' preferences over joint outcomes alone, disentangled from their beliefs about the other persons' behavior, David M. Messick and Charles G. McClintock in 1968 devised what has become known as the decomposed game technique. Basically, any task where one decision maker can alone determine which one out of at least two own-other resource allocation options will be realized is a decomposed game (also often referred to as dictator-game, especially in economics, where it is often implemented as a constant-sum situation).
By observing which own-other resource allocation a person chooses in a decomposed game, it is possible to infer that person's preferences over own-other resource allocations, i.e. social value orientation. Since there is no other person making a decision that affects the joint outcome, there is no interdependence, and therefore a potential effect of beliefs on behavior is ruled out.
To give an example, consider two options, A and B. If you choose option A, you will receive $100, and another (unknown) person will receive $10. If you choose option B, you will receive $85, and the other (unknown) person will also receive $85. This is a decomposed game. If a person chooses option B, we can infer that this person does not only consider the outcome for the self when making a decision, but also takes into account the outcome for the other.
Conceptualization When people seek to maximize their gains, they are said to be proself. But when people are also concerned with others' gains and losses, they are said to be prosocial. There are four categories within SVO. Individualistic and competitive SVOs are proself while cooperative and altruistic SVOs are prosocial: provided a geometric framework of SVO (the SVO ring, see Figure 1) with which they could show that SVO is in principle not a categorical, but a continuous construct that allows for an infinite number of social value orientations.
thumb|*Figure 1*: The SVO ring The basis for any of these measures is the *decomposed game technique*, i.e. a set of non-constant-sum [[dictator-games. The most commonly used SVO measures are the following.
Ring Measure The Ring measure was devised by Wim B. G. Liebrand in 1984 and is based on the geometric SVO framework proposed by Griesinger and Livingston in 1973. is directly based on the use of decomposed games as suggested by Messick and McClintock (1968). assess SVO on a continuous scale, rather than categorizing subjects into nominal motivational groups. The instrument consists of 6 primary and 9 secondary items. In each item of the paper-based version of the Slider measure, a subject has to indicate her most preferred own-other outcome allocation out of nine options. From a subject's choices in the primary items, the SVO angle can be computed. There is also an online version of the Slider measure, where subjects can slide along a continuum of own-other payoff allocations in the items, allowing for a very precise assessment of a person's SVO. The secondary items can be used for differentiating between the motivations to maximize the joint outcome and to minimize the difference in outcomes (inequality aversion) among prosocial subjects. The SVO Slider Measure has been shown to be more reliable than previously used measures, and yields SVO scores on a continuous scale. of Social Value Orientation revealed that response of the amygdala to economic inequity (i.e., absolute value of reward difference between self and the other) is correlated with the degree of prosocial orientation. A functional magnetic resonance imaging study found that responses of Medial Prefrontal Cortex - an area that is typically associated with social cognition- mirrored preferences over competitive, individualistic and cooperative allocations. Similar findings in this or neighboring areas (ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) have been reported elsewhere.
Stylized facts SVO has been shown to be predictive of important behavioral variables, such as:
- fiscal behavior
- cooperative behavior in social dilemmas
- helping behavior
- donation behavior
- proenvironmental behavior
- negotiation behavior
Furthermore, it has been shown that individualism is prevalent among very young children, and that the frequency of expressions of prosocial and competitive SVOs increases with age. Among adults, it has been shown repeatedly that prosocial SVOs are most frequently observed (up to 60 percent), followed by individualistic SVOs (about 30-40 percent), and competitive SVOs (about 5-10 percent). Evidence also suggests that SVO is first and foremost determined by socialization, and that genetic predisposition plays a minor role in SVO development. However, the general concept underlying SVO is inherently interdisciplinary, and has been studied under different names in a variety of different scientific fields; it is the concept of distributive preferences. Originally, the SVO construct as conceptualized by the SVO ring framework
<math> U_{(\pi_{s}, \pi_{o})} = a\pi_{s} + b\pi_{o} - c*|\pi_{s} - \pi_{o}| </math>.
Several utility functions as representations of peoples' concerns for the welfare of others have been devised and used (for a very prominent example, see Fehr & Schmidt, 1999) in economics. It is a challenge for future interdisciplinary research to combine the findings from different scientific disciplines and arrive at a unifying theory of SVO. Representing SVO in terms of a utility function and going beyond the construct's original conceptualization may facilitate the achievement of this ambitious goal.