Measuring Social Value Orientation

By Ryan O. Murphy, K. Ackermann, Michel J. J. Handgraaf. Social Science Research Network, 2011

1,053 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Narrow self-interest is often used as a simplifying assumption when studying people making decisions in social contexts. Nonetheless, people exhibit a wide range of different motivations when choosing unilaterally among interdependent outcomes. Measuring the magnitude of the concern people have for others, sometimes called Social Value Orientation (SVO), has been an interest of many social scientists for decades and several different measurement methods have been developed so far. Here we introduce a new measure of SVO that has several advantages over existent methods. A detailed description of the new measurement method is presented, along with norming data that provide evidence of its solid psychometric properties. We conclude with a brief discussion of the research streams that would benefit from a more sensitive and higher resolution measure of SVO, and extend an invitation to others to use this new measure which is freely available.

Subfields: Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb79ad0f2c8be166de2bbcb7c26dbb3770dedf0c

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Citations in the corpus

On the Psychology of Scarcity: When Reminders of Resource Scarcity Promote Selfish (and Generous) Behavior (2015, methodology): “Following the measure’s instructions (Murphy, Ackermann, and Handgraaf 2011; Van Lange et al. 1997), prior to making their point-allocation decisions, participants were asked to imagine that the points had value to themselves as well as to the other person.”
Social value orientation moderates the effects of intuition versus reflection on responses to unfair ultimatum offers (2017, methodology): “In the screening session, we measured participants’ SVO with the Slider Measure (Murphy et al., 2011), a wellvalidated tool for assessing SVO (Murphy & Ackermann, 2014).”
Signaling can increase consumers' willingness to pay for green products. Theoretical model and experimental evidence (2019, positive): “In a second step, every subject’s social value orientation (SVO) was measured using the standard procedure suggested by Murphy et al. (2011) and implemented for z-Tree by Crosetto et al. (2012).”
Many Labs 2: Investigating Variation in Replicability Across Samples and Settings (2018, background): “In discussion with the original first author, an alternative measure, the SVO slider (Murphy, Ackermann, & Handgraaf, 2011), was identified as a useful replacement to yield a continuous distribution of scores.”
Gender Differences in Honesty: The Role of Social Value Orientation (2017, methodology): “In this respect we used the money allocation task introduced by Murphy et al. (2011).”
High-Dimension Human Value Representation in Large Language Models (2024, background): “…to understand the ethics knowledge of human values from language models including the ETHICS dataset [51] [14] adopts a social value orientation (SVO) [54] and SVO slider measures to assess the alignment between the real value mapped with LLMs’ behaviors by SVO with its human-aligned value.”