Social Value Orientations - SVO From A Broader Perspective

SVO From A Broader Perspective

The SVO construct is rooted in social psychology, but has also been studied in other disciplines, such as economics. However, the general concept underlying SVO is inherently interdisciplinary, and has been studied under different names in a variety of different scientific fields (see introduction section); it is the concept of distributive preferences. Originally, the SVO construct as conceptualized by the SVO ring framework did not include preferences such as inequality aversion, which is a distributive preference heavily studied in experimental economics. This particular motivation can also not be assessed with commonly used measures of SVO, except with the SVO Slider Measure. 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.

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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) 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.