Kurt A. Ackermann

Social Value Orientation: Theoretical and Measurement Issues in the Study of Social Preferences

What motivates people when they make decisions and how those motivations are potentially entangled with concerns for others are central topics for the social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. According to the postulate of narrow self-interest, decision makers have the goal of maximizing personal payoffs and are wholly indifferent to the consequences for others. The postulate of narrow self-interest—which has been influential in economics, psychology, and sociology—is precise and powerful but is often simply wrong. Its inadequacy is well known and efforts have been made to develop reliable and valid measurement methods to quantify the more nuanced social preferences that people really have. In this paper, we report on the emergence and development of the predominant conceptualization of social preferences in psychology: social value orientation (SVO). Second, we discuss the relationship between measurement and theory development of the SVO construct. We then provide an overview of the literature regarding measurement methods that have been used to assess individual variations in social preferences. We conclude with a comparative evaluation of the various measures and provide suggestions regarding the measures’ constructive use in building psychologically realistic theories of people’s social preferences.

Reciprocity as an Individual Difference

There is accumulating evidence that decision makers are sensitive to the distribution of resources among themselves and others, beyond what is expected from the predictions of narrow self-interest. These social preferences are typically conceptualized as being static and existing independently of information about the other people influenced by a DM’s allocation choices. In this paper we consider the reactivity of a decision makers’s social preferences in response to information about the intentions or past behavior of the person to be affected by the decision maker’s allocation choices (i.e., how do social preferences change in relation to the other’s type). This paper offers a conceptual framework for characterizing the link between distributive preferences and reciprocity, and reports on experiments in which these two constructs are disentangled and the relation between the two is characterized.

Explaining Behavior in Public Goods Games: How Preferences and Beliefs Affect Contribution Levels

There is a large body of evidence showing that a substantial proportion of people contribute positive amounts in public goods games, even if the situation is one-shot and completely anonymous. Clearly, this is in conflict with the prediction of neoclassic economic theory. One of the most promising explanations of why people contribute anything in this context draws upon an interaction between positive social preferences and beliefs about the preferences and anticipated behavior of others. We follow this line of thinking and investigate the predictive power of social preferences and beliefs on contribution levels in both a one-shot and a repeated linear public goods game. We report on the degree to which individual contributions can be explained when individual preferences and beliefs are taken into account, and additionally how preferences and beliefs change in response to the behavior of others.

Social Framing and Cooperation: The Roles and Interaction of Preferences and Beliefs

Evidence suggests that there are substantial and systematic dierences in cooperation rates under varying framing conditions in social dilemmas. Several explanations of these dierences

Save the Planet for Humans' Sake: A Study on Social and Environmental Value Orientations

Evidence for the relationship between social and environmental concerns is mixed. However, these constructs have commonly been measured by diverse methods that do not readily facilitate a direct comparison of results. We employ a consistent incentivized method to assess subjects’ social value orientations (SVO) and also their motivations for the environment and humanitarian aid. Subjects made resource allocation choices with real consequences while the experimental design ensured comparability of subjects’ preferences (i.e., their willingness to make tradeoffs for different environmental and social causes). We found that social and environmental value orientations are intertwined, and the results clearly show that people are generally willing to pay more for the benefit of people in need, compared to abstract environmental causes. We conclude that interventions to nudge people towards environmentally-friendly behavior may have a greater impact if the human suffering as resulting from global warming is made salient.

Playing a Game or Making a Decision? Methodological Issues in the Measurement of Distributional Preferences

In terms of role assignment and informational characteristics, different contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement process. We use a within-subjects design and systemically vary role assignment as well as the way information is displayed to subjects when measuring distributional preferences in resource allocation tasks as well as proper games. Specifically we examine choice behavior in the contexts of role certainty, role uncertainty, decomposed games, and matrix games. Results show that there is large heterogeneity in the choices people make when deciding how to allocate resources between themselves and some other person under different contextual frames. For instance, people make more prosocial choices under role uncertainty as compared to role certainty. Furthermore, altering the way information is displayed given a particular situation can have a more dramatic effect on choice behavior than altering the situation itself. That is, depending on how information is displayed, people may behave as if they would perform a non-strategic decision making task when in fact they are playing a proper game characterized by strategic interdependence.

The influences of social context on the measurement of distributional preferences

Different social contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement process. We use a within-subjects design and measure distributional preferences in resource allocation tasks with role certainty, role uncertainty, decomposed games, and matrix games. Results show that, at the aggregate level, role uncertainty and decomposed games lead to higher degrees of prosociality when compared to role certainty. At the individual level, we observe considerable differences in behavior across the social contexts, indicating that the majority of people are sensitive to these different social settings but respond in different ways.