Social value orientations
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.).
The SVO construct has its history in the study of interdependent decision making, i.e. strategic interactions between two or more people.
In this situation, they are to pretend that they are a pair of criminals being interrogated by detectives in separate rooms.
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.
When used in the lab, the dynamics of this situation are stimulated as participants play for points or for money.
[1] 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.
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[2] devised what has become known as the decomposed game technique.
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.
If a person chooses a particular own-other outcome allocation on the ring, that person's SVO can be represented by the angle of the line starting at the origin of the Cartesian plane and intersecting the coordinates of the respective chosen own-other outcome allocation.
If, for instance, a person would choose the option on the circle that maximizes the own outcome, this would refer to an SVO angle of
would indicate a perfectly cooperative (maximizing joint outcomes) SVO, while an angle of
The Ring measure was devised by Wim B. G. Liebrand in 1984[4] and is based on the geometric SVO framework proposed by Griesinger and Livingston in 1973.
The 24 pairs of outcomes correspond to equally spaced adjacent own-other-payoff allocations on an SVO ring, i.e. a circle with a certain radius centered at the origin of the Cartesian plane.
Adding up a subject's 24 choices yields a motivational vector with a certain length and angle.
This measure allows for the detection of uncommon pathological SVOs, such as masochism, sadomasochism, or martyrdom, which would indicate that a subject attaches a negative weight (
The triple-dominance measure[6] is directly based on the use of decomposed games as suggested by Messick and McClintock (1968).
[2] Concretely, the triple-dominance measure consists of nine items, each of which asks a subject to choose one out of three own-other-outcome allocations.
The Slider measure[7] assess SVO on a continuous scale, rather than categorizing subjects into nominal motivational groups.
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.
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.
[7] Some recent papers have explored whether Social Value Orientation is somehow reflected on human brain activity.
The first functional magnetic resonance imaging study [8] 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 [9] 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.
[5] The SVO construct is rooted in social psychology, but has also been studied in other disciplines, such as economics.
[7] The original SVO concept can be extended, though, by representing peoples' distributive preferences in terms of utility functions, as is standard in economics.
For instance, a representation of SVO that includes the expression of a motivation to minimize differences between outcomes could be formalized as follows.
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[19]) 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.
