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Category: Project

Description: Social value orientation (SVO) is a person’s preference for a specific distribution of outcomes between themselves and another individual. Establishing cooperation can be dependent upon whether the individual seeks equality in outcomes (prosocial orientation), to enhance their personal outcome (individualistic orientation) or to increase their relative advantage over others (competitive orientation). These orientations have been found to be predictive of strategies used in experimental economic games (Van Lange and Visser, 1999), and have been found to affect evaluations of reputational incentives (De Cremer & Van Lange, 2001; Simpson & Willer, 2008), and cooperative decision making (Van Lange, 1999). Therefore we posit that prosocials are less strategic than individualists when reputational opportunities arise. Thus, we predict that individualists will display increased sensitivity to invalid cues of observation, such as eyespots, as compared to prosocials. This study will extend on previous research on reputational cues and SVO by extending it to invalid cues of observation (e.g. eyespots).