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Anticipated emotion plays an important role in resource allocation behaviour.

Researchers have shown that when people face an allocation decision they consider the extent to which the outcome of the decision will make them feel positive or negative (Van Der Schalk et al., 2012). When considering these emotional consequences of their decisions, these anticipated emotions motivate them to behave either fairly or unfairly to another person. This shows that individuals strive to feel positive rather than negative when making a decision and that this is reflected in their decision making. Here, I propose that differences in social value orientation (SVO) may be related to the extent to which individuals anticipate positive and negative emotions about fair or unfair decisions.

2.1.1 The development of SVO measure

Previous studies have shown that SVO is a stable preference in allocation behaviour (Messick & McClintock, 1968). Different researchers have developed well-known measures to determine an individual’s SVO, for example, the decomposed game (Messick &

McClintock, 1968), the Triple Dominance Measure (TDM) (Van Lange et al., 1997) and the SVO Slider Measure (SVO-SM) (Murphy et al., 2011). Use of these measures reveals that SVO is an underlying motivation of cooperative and competitive behaviours in resource allocation and social dilemmas. However, none of these measures takes into account the proposed anticipated emotion as a psychological mechanism that reflects these differences in preferences and mediates their impact on decision making. Here, the nature of each of these measures is discussed, followed by an explanation of the development of a new measure that focuses on anticipated emotions as a psychological construct that may be responsible for individual differences for prosocial and competitive motivations in resource allocation.

Early studies done by Messick and McClintock (1968) showed that SVO is an important motivation underlying cooperative and competitive behaviour in social dilemmas.

Messick and McClintock (1968) demonstrated the three motivational orientations:

individualist (focus on own gain), prosocial (focus on joint gain) and competitive (focus on relative gain) by using decomposed games (deviced by Pruitt, 1967). Participants played the decomposed game consisting of 80 different two-choice matrices that depicted divisions between self and an imaginary ‘other’ person. Those completing the measure were told that they would not meet or interact with the ‘other’ person. With the different configurations of the 80 different two-choice matrices depicting six classes (calculated using an algebraic permutation of the three motives outcome), Messick and McClintock (1968) manipulated the information given to the participants after each condition. There were three conditions, whereby participants received their own cumulative score, the joint cumulative score of both players, or the difference between their own and the other’s cumulative scores in the game.

This was done to isolate the social motives underlying allocation behaviour. The researchers demonstrated that these decomposed games can assess individual motivational orientations and these orientations are affected when certain information is given to the participants. For example, when participants were given information on the relative score achieved, they tended to maximise the difference between themselves and the other player’s scores, compared to participants who were only given information about their own cumulative score or the joint cumulative score.

In later research, SVO was also measured using a similar decomposed game but here the game was modified into a more concise measure referred to as the Triple Dominance Measure (TDM) (Van Lange et al., 1997). Van Lange and colleagues (1997) reduced Messick and McClintock’s (1968) decomposed games to nine items and simplified the choices provided in each item. In the TDM each item involves the allocation of a number of

points between the responder and an imaginary ‘other’ person. The three options represent a competitive choice (which maximizes the difference between the responder and the ‘other’), an individualistic choice (which maximizes the individual gain for the responder) or a prosocial choice (which involves an equal distribution of points and maximizes the joint gain). In this way, the researchers framed the options in such a way that each item represented one SVO. They recruited participants on campuses (e.g., in cafeterias and libraries). Participants were classified as prosocial, individualist, or competitor if at least six of their responses were consistent in terms of preference. They identified 248 participants as prosocial, 164 as individualistic, 46 as competitors, and 115 participants could not be classified. Although this measure is a simplified and concise measure as compared to Messick and McClintock’s (1968) measure of SVO, the TDM is not capable of identifying everyone’s SVO, because as we have just seen, 20% of participants were left unidentified.

A measure that addresses some of the shortcomings of the TDM is the SVO-Slider Measure (SVO-SM) developed by Murphy and colleagues (2011). This measure consists of 15 items and each item has 9 options. Across the 9 options, a continuum of joint payoff is presented to the participants whereby they are able to indicate which allocation they prefer.

Unlike the decomposed games and the TDM, the SVO-SM treats SVO as a continuous rather than categorical variable. The SVO-SM is scored in such a way that a single index of a person’s SVO is computed by taking the mean allocation for self and the mean allocation for the other, which is converted to an SVO ‘angle’. Thus, this measure is more sensitive to subtle individual differences, because it measures SVO on a continuous scale rather than as a categorical division. This makes use of information that would be lost when converting a continuous variable to a categorical variable.

The three measures discussed above capture SVO in terms of choices between different options regarding how resources should be divided between self and another person.

These measures have demonstrated that SVO is a stable individual difference that captures preferences in social decision making. Another line of research has demonstrated that there is a relation between SVO and emotional processes in decision making (Zeelenberg et al., 2008). In a study by Nelissen and Dijker (2007), it was found that the induction of fear only affected prosocials, leading them to behave less cooperatively in the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a type of social dilemma). The researchers noted that fear is related to avoiding risk or loss in a social dilemma context. By inducing fear, they argued that individuals would behave less cooperatively in order to avoid losses. However, this should only affect individuals who are not already motivated to not cooperate. This explains why it was only prosocials who were affected by the fear induction. By contrast, the induction of guilt only affected proselfs, such that they behaved more cooperatively in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Nelissen and Dijker (2007) argued that a guilt induction would lead participants to take the other person’s interests into account. However, prosocials already have a dispositional tendency to cooperate, so inducing guilt would not increase prosocials’ cooperation. Because proselfs do not have a tendency to cooperate in social dilemmas, inducing guilt should trigger proselfs to think about the other player and behave more cooperatively. This example shows that emotions interact with dispositional preferences in social dilemma situations. More specifically, the induction of fear and guilt before making a decision leads the individual to consider features of the decision (the possibility of loss, or the interests of the other person) that they might not normally take into account.

2.1.2 Measuring anticipated emotion as a psychological mechanism of the differences in SVO

The anticipated emotions that I will focus on in my thesis in relation to resource allocation decision making are pride, regret and guilt. Anticipating feeling proud about being fair can lead people to share more resources with another person, whereas anticipating feeling

proud about being unfair can lead people to share less of their resources (Van Der Schalk et al., 2012). Research has also shown that there is a link between the consideration of pride and cooperative behaviour in social dilemmas (Dorfman et al., 2014). Anticipated regret and guilt about being fair can lead people to share fewer resources, whereas anticipated regret and guilt about being unfair can lead people to share more resources (Ketelaar & Tung Au, 2003; Van Der Schalk et al., 2012). These results show that anticipated emotions can both increase and decrease cooperative and competitive behaviours.

The literature reviewed above shows that anticipated emotions can be predictive of cooperative and competitive behaviour. Anticipated pride about being fair and anticipated guilt and regret about being unfair could be classified as cooperative emotions. Similarly, anticipated pride about being unfair and anticipated guilt and regret about being fair can be classified as competitive emotions. The aim of the studies reported in this chapter is to develop a measure that captures the anticipated emotions relevant to decision making in a single measure. Such a measure should be able to capture the psychological motivation underlying decision making that is not captured by SVO measures. I will refer to this measure as the Index of Cooperative and competitive Emotions (ICE) measure. This index is specifically designed to capture the cooperative and competitive emotions that are anticipated by an individual when this person considers making a fair or unfair division of resources.

In previous research, anticipated emotions have normally been evaluated by asking participants to rate the emotions that they expect to feel in a certain imaginary situation on a scale running from 1, not at all, to a higher number indicating very much (C. M. Brown &

McConnell, 2011; Van Der Schalk et al., 2012). For example, in the studies by Van Der Schalk and colleagues (2012), anticipated emotions were measured by providing participants with allocation scenarios and asking participants how would they feel in each of two scenarios, one in which they divided the allocation equally and another in which they divided

it unequally favouring themselves. Participants rated the extent to which they would feel either proud or regretful in each scenario on a scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much).

In this chapter, a detailed discussion of the new measure is provided, along with evidence of its psychometric properties. The aim of Study 1 was to develop a reliable and valid ICE measure. In Study 2, I was interested in the stability of the ICE measure by examining the correlation between SVO and ICE measure when the measurement of SVO and ICE took place at two different time-points. In Study 3, the test-retest reliability of the ICE measure was examined by examining the correlation between two ICE measures that were administered at different time-points. Studies 2 and 3 draw on data from studies that will be discussed further in Chapter 5.