The Influences of Social Context on the Measurement of Distributional Preferences

Abstract

Different social contexts have been used when measuring distributional preferences. This could be problematic as contextual variance may inadvertently muddle the measurement process. We use a within-subjects design and measure distributional preferences in resource allocation tasks with role certainty, role uncertainty, decomposed games, and matrix games. Results show that, at the aggregate level, role uncertainty and decomposed games lead to higher degrees of prosociality when compared to role certainty. At the individual level, we observe considerable differences in behavior across the social contexts, indicating that the majority of people are sensitive to these different social settings but respond in different ways.

The Informational Affective Tie Mechanism: On the Role of Uncertainty, Context, and Attention in Caring

“…Supportive of this predicted variability are findings of individual SVO (angle) changes after social interaction experiences in a social dilemma experiment (Brandts et al 2009) and in a public good experiment (Ackermann and Murphy 2019), while van Dijk et al (2002) find no impact of an individual decisionmaking task. Furthermore, the role played by contexts in the GTV construct finds support in the observed context dependency in the measurement of SVO (Greiff et al 2016, Bogaert et al 2008. Importantly, because the SVO literature typically focuses on a categorical distinction between SVO types (like prosocials versus individualistist) -comprising ranges of preference weights or angles as measured by the Ringtest, for example -high test-retest stability scores need not imply that the individual preference weights are stable.…”