Social Value Orientation

Measurement

The concept of social value orientation is rooted in classic research on cooperation and competition, which revealed (largely unexpected, at that time) a good deal of individual stability in behavior over a series of interactions and across situations. These considerations, as well as the aim of disentangling (or decomposing) interpersonal goals underlying behavior in experimental games, have inspired researchers to design a measure that is closely linked to game behavior. Rather than focusing on a 2-by-2 matrix game, such as the Prisoner's Dilemma Game, the instrument represents decompositions of game situations, capturing consequences of one's behavior for oneself and another person. A frequently used instrument is the Triple-Dominance Measure of Social Values. In this instrument, outcomes are presented in terms of points said to be valuable to self and the other, and the other person is described as someone the person does not know and that he or she will never knowingly meet in the future (in an effort to exclude the role of considerations relevant to the future interactions).

An example of a decomposed game is the choice among three options:

• Option A: 480 points for self and 80 points for the other person
• Option B: 540 points for self and 280 points for the other person
• Option C: 480 points for self and 480 points for the other person

In this example, option A represents the competitive choice because it yields the greatest outcomes for self relative to the other (480 – 80 = 400 points); option B represents the individualistic choice because it yields the greatest absolute outcomes for self (540 points); and option C represents the prosocial choice because it yields the greatest joint outcomes (480 + 480 = 960 points) as well as the smallest absolute difference between outcomes for self and other (480 – 480 = 0 points). In research using this instrument, most individuals are classified as prosocial (about 60%–65%), followed by individualists (about 25%), and only a small minority is classified as competitive (about 10%–15%). Of course, these percentages might differ as a function of the sample, depending on variables such as (sub)cultural differences, gender, number of siblings, and age. For example, prosocial orientation is more likely to be observed in collectivistic cultures (as opposed to individualistic cultures), in women (as opposed to men), and among people with a large number of siblings, especially sisters. And prosocial orientations are more commons among older people (at least up to 65 years) than among younger people.

...