Social preferences and well-being: theory and evidence

Measurement method of social preferences

We use SVO, an aspect of social preference, as an explanatory variable for well-being; as a continuous variable, SVO represents degree of prosociality. This means that we are using SVO as a proxy variable for the prosociality parameter. Previous studies have developed a variety of methods for measuring SVO (Messick and McClintock, 1968). The present study uses the Slider Measure developed by Murphy et al. (2011), a method that many scholars have begun to use.

In this method, subjects are asked to choose an allocation of gains between the self (the…