Let’s imagine a hypothetical situation where you and your friend have gone out to dinner, and both of you would like the same dessert. There is only one dessert dish left available, and you order before your friend does. How do you choose to share the dessert?
Option 1: You leave the whole dessert for your friend
Option 2: You keep a little bit of your portion for yourself, but share most of it with your friend
Option 3: You share the entire portion, dividing it equally with your friend
Option 4: You take the entire portion for yourself
Option 5: You take the entire portion for yourself, and also order the rest of the desserts available, so there are none left for your friend
Remember which option you picked - I'll come back to this later on!
So, what is social value orientation? Social value orientation is defined as a person's preference about how to allocate resources, such as money, between the self and other people. The concept of social value orientation, or SVO, is used to categorise decision makers according to their attitudes in relation to distributing resources. SVO directly corresponds to how much importance is placed on the general welfare of others in relation to themselves. SVO is considered an individual difference variable (a 'variable peculiar to an individual, which can be studied to see if it affects the performance of the individual', according to Oxford Reference) - this is due to the assumption that people vary in the weight they attach to other people's outcomes compared to their own. The general basis of SVO has been studied in a wide number of disciplines - namely, economics, sociology, and biology, to name a few.
Let’s run through a couple of key definitions. The concept of SVO generally distinguishes between two groups of decision makers, those who are prosocial and those who are proself. These two groups are further subdivided into five distinct social value orientations, which I’ll explore going forward. Prosocial is defined as when people are concerned with others’ gains and losses, as opposed to being proself, when people seek to maximise their own gains alone.
When we talk about the conceptualisation of SVO, we discuss the five distinct social value orientation types: altruistic, co-operative, equality-seeking, individualistic, and competitive:
The first SVO is altruistic. This is the SVO type you would be if you picked the first option in the hypothetical situation earlier. Altruism falls into the prosocial bracket of SVO, and those who are altruistic tend to act selflessly, often sacrificing their own resources to further others’ gains. Altruistic people are more likely to donate to charities, for example, due to their generosity.
The second SVO is co-operative. If you picked option two, you are of the co-operative SVO. Like altruism, co-operation falls into the prosocial bracket of SVO, although co-operative people, while generous, tend not to be as freely giving as altruistic people. Co-operative people tend to be team players who prioritise the group’s interests over their own. They prefer win-win situations, in which they themselves as well as the group as a whole benefit.
Option three corresponds to the third SVO type - people who are equality-seeking, although many SVO measurement techniques do not necessarily acknowledge this type. Those who are equality-seeking are motivated by fairness and justice in particular, and they like to allocate resources equally to all parties involved. This means that everyone receives the same amount.
The first of the proself SVOs is the individualistic type, the type you would be if you picked the fourth option. Since individualists generally try to maximise their personal gains, they prioritise their own interests over that of the group, often not taking the group’s interests into account. Individualistic people hence neither help out nor deter the group, and although their actions may indirectly affect others in the group, these effects are unintended.
The last of the SVO types is that of the fifth option - the competitive type. Those who are competitive are proself. Like individualists, those of the competitive SVO try to maximise their personal gains and prioritise their own interests over that of the group, although the main difference between the individualistic and competitive SVOs is that competitive people also try to minimise others’ gains at the same time. Those of the competitive SVO type often develop conflicts with those who are prosocial, due to their abrasive styles. However, competitors rarely change their styles as a result, seeing as they are often unconcerned about maintaining interpersonal relations.
How is social value orientation measured? The basis of how it is measured is decomposed game technique, which is essentially a set of dictator games in which the person playing has full control over how much to distribute between others. There are three ways in which SVO is measured:
Ring measure
Triple-dominance measure
Slider measure.
The ring measure was designed by Liebrand in 1984 and is based on the geometric SVO framework proposed by Griesinger and Livingston in 1973. In the ring measure, people involved are requested to choose between 24 pairs of options that allocate money to the person in question and the ‘other’. The 24 pairs of outcomes correspond to equally-spaced adjacent allocations on an SVO ring, where the vertical axis (y) measures the number of points or money allocated to the ‘other’ and the horizontal axis (x) measures the amount allocated to the self. Adding the 24 choices yields a motivational vector - the length of the vector shows the consistency of the subject’s behaviour, while the angle shows the subject’s SVO. This measure also allows for the detection of uncommon pathological SVOs (such as masochism, sadomasochism, or martyrdom).
The triple-dominance measure uses the basis of decomposed games as suggested by Messick and McClintock in 1968 and consists of a template containing three options. One option maximises the outcome for the self, a second option maximises the joint outcome, and the third option maximises the relative gain.
The SVO slider measure can be administered either as a paper-based choice task or an online measure. It assesses SVO on a continuous scale rather than categorising subjects into nominal groups. The subject must indicate their preferred choice out of the six primary options - from the subject’s choices, the SVO angle can be inferred. The secondary choices help in differentiating the motivations to maximise the joint outcome and minimise the difference in outcomes (inequality aversion) among prosocial subjects. The SVO slider measure, particularly the online one, is described as being more reliable than other SVO measures.
SVO and anticipated emotions when dividing resources play a key role in providing guidelines for explaining why people make different monetary choices. Situational factors can also be used to increase or decrease others’ spendings - based on both SVO and whether individuals must distribute resources ingroup or outgroup, for example, we can map how much or how little of the resource will be given out. In particular, SVO affects cognitions and accounts for decisions, especially in negotiation settings.
On balance, with knowledge of different SVOs and the situations in which they make certain economic decisions, firms can make better decisions (e.g. from a marketing perspective), leading to greater revenue. Individually, knowing our SVOs can help us make more informed and conscious choices.
Writer: Ritisha Baidyaray
Editor: Ritisha Baidyaray
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