Past SVO measures, such as the decomposed games used by Messick and McClintock (1968), the Triple Dominance measure (Van Lange et al., 1997), and the SVO-Slider measure
(Murphy et al., 2011), were developed to measure individuals’ preferences for different resource outcomes. Although these measures are successful in the sense that they show that preferences measured in these ways are predictive of actual allocation behaviour, they do not shed much light on the psychological mechanism underlying the individual differences in preferences. As argued above, because prosocials’ behaviour appears to be related to their greater sympathy/empathy (Eggum et al., 2011; Van Kleef & Van Lange, 2008), I proposed that anticipated emotions might play a role in explaining these individual preferences. In Chapter 2, I described the development of the Index of Cooperative and Competitive Emotion (ICE) measure. This was intended to assess anticipated emotions that are relevant to resource allocation decisions and to extend our understanding of how individual differences in SVO influence behaviour. In the three studies reported in this chapter, the newly developed measure was shown to be reliable and valid. This justifies its use to address the main research question of my thesis.
Using the newly developed ICE measure, the main research question was addressed in Chapter 3. In the two studies reported in this chapter I investigated my hypothesis that anticipated emotions would mediate the relationship between SVO and allocation behaviour.
The findings of Study 1 provided good support for this prediction, however anticipated emotions only partially mediated the relation between SVO and allocation behaviour. It was also noted that the sample consisted mainly of prosocials. It could be that the mediating role of anticipated emotions is more evident among prosocials than among proselfs. Thus, in Study 2 I aimed to recruit a more “proself” sample (drawn from the population of business school students) to see whether there would also be evidence of mediation in this sample. It was the case that the sample was more varied with respect to SVO, although proselfs were still outnumbered by prosocials. As expected, there were significant differences in both SVO and anticipated emotions between the psychology student sample recruited in Study 1 and the
business school sample recruited in Study 2, although results did not show any differences in psychology and business school students’ allocation behaviour as did previous studies that have found differences (Van Lange et al., 2011). However, evidence of anticipated emotions as a partial mediator was once again found in Study 2.
By measuring participants’ SVO and anticipated emotions using the ICE measure and asking participants to divide a set number of tokens with financial value between themselves and an anonymous other, the findings of these two studies show a reliable tendency for anticipated emotion to partially mediate the relationship between SVO and allocation behaviour. These studies provide the first evidence that the individual differences in preferences for resource allocation that are captured by measures of SVO can be explained at a more proximate level by differences in the emotions that prosocials and proselfs anticipate experiencing when making decisions about how to allocate resources between self and other.
In an influential paper it was argued that most psychological research studies have been conducted in western cultures, using samples drawn from western populations (Henrich et al., 2010). This poses the risk that the findings of such research may not generalise to cultures that have different norms, values, and practices. To avoid depending exclusively on the results of studies using western samples, in the research reported in Chapter 4, I replicated the research conducted in Chapter 3 using an Asian sample, recruited in Malaysia.
Additionally, due to the multi-ethnic and multicultural nature of Malaysia and its specific history that has led to a form of segregation among Malaysians (Cheong et al., 2016;
Montesino, 2012; Tyson et al., 2017), I took the opportunity to investigate the effect of the receiver’s ingroup or outgroup identity on individual’s allocation behaviour, expecting to find evidence of a tendency to be more fair when making allocations to ingroup receivers.
According to Social Identity Theory, individuals are motivated to achieve a positive distinction between their ingroup and their outgroup (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). To create this
positive distinctiveness, lower social status group members behave in a way that helps them to increase their social standing, for example by allocating resources fairly and thereby gaining the moral high ground. According to Social Dominance theory (Pratto et al., 1994), individuals differ in their preferences for status differences and group hierarchies in society.
High status groups generally have greater preference for this and are motivated to maintain status differences between groups, whereas low status groups tend to have less preference for this and are motivated to promote equality. Thus, I also explored whether allocators from the majority group in Malaysia (Malays) differed in their allocation behaviour from those from minority groups (Chinese and Indians).
In these Malaysian studies, there was reliable evidence of a similar mediating role of anticipated emotions in the relation between SVO and allocation behaviour, despite the study being conducted in different cultural population. However, there was no evidence of differences in allocation behaviour towards ingroup and outgroup receivers. These findings are inconsistent with past literature showing ingroup favouritism in allocation behaviour (Balliet et al., 2014). There are several possible reasons for this inconsistency and these will be discussed below in the section on limitations. On the other hand, there was evidence of a difference in allocation behaviour on the part of majority and minority allocators in Study 1.
These differences in allocation behaviour between majority and minority could reflect the preferences for maintaining existing status differences between groups that is described by social dominance theory, whereby majority group participants (Malays) have higher SDO and are less likely to demonstrate fairness to others than minority group participants (Chinese). However, the pattern that majority group participants demonstrated less fairness was not observed in Study 2. Nevertheless, individual differences in SDO did predict allocation behaviour, and anticipated emotions were found to play a mediating role in the relation between SDO and allocation behaviour. This shows the potential for anticipated
emotions to explain the influence of another individual difference measure that shapes decision making in resource allocation dilemmas and speaks to the generality of anticipated emotions as a proximal psychological explanation to explain dispositional preferences for outcomes of divisions.
The studies reported in chapters 3 and 4 relied mostly on correlational data. An experimental study was needed to establish the causal chain linking SVO to allocation behaviour via anticipated emotions (Spencer et al., 2005). Thus, in the two studies reported in Chapter 5, this causal chain was examined by manipulating the level of emotions anticipated when making resource allocation decisions. In two studies, it was found that instructing participants to down-regulate their emotions when making resource allocation decisions led them to allocate fewer tokens to the other person. The findings also showed that the down-regulation condition had a stronger effect on participants’ allocation behaviour than did the up-regulating condition. The findings from this chapter complement other studies that have found that down-regulating emotions leads to an increase in antisocial behaviour (Van’t Wout et al., 2010).
The studies reported in Chapter 5 also examined whether emotion regulation moderates the influence of SVO on allocation behaviour. Although there was no significant interaction between SVO and emotion regulation condition, there was some suggestive evidence that the manipulation of anticipated emotion had an effect on the strength of the relation between SVO and allocation behaviour. The patterns in up-regulating and down-regulating showed in Figure 5.3 in Chapter 5 suggest that the manipulation disrupted the normal relation between SVO and allocation behaviour as it differed from the pattern in the control condition.