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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.).

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.


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