Guassi Moreira João F, Parkinson Carolyn
Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA.
Commun Psychol. 2024 Sep 6;2(1):84. doi: 10.1038/s44271-024-00132-2.
The idea that individuals ascribe value to social phenomena, broadly construed, is well-established. Despite the ubiquity of this concept, defining social value in the context of interpersonal relationships remains elusive. This is notable because while prominent theories of human social behavior acknowledge the role of value-based processes, they mostly emphasize the value of individual actions an agent may choose to take in a given environment. Comparatively little is known about how humans value their interpersonal relationships. To address this, we devised a method for engineering a behavioral signature of social value in several independent samples (total N = 1111). Incorporating the concept of opportunity cost from economics and data-driven quantitative methods, we derived this signature by sourcing and weighting a range of social behaviors based on how likely individuals are to prioritize them in the face of limited resources. We examined how strongly the signature was expressed in self-reported social behaviors with specific relationship partners (a parent, close friend, and acquaintance). Social value scores track with other aspects of these relationships (e.g., relationship quality, aversion to losing relationship partners), are predictive of decision preferences on a range of tasks, and display good psychometric properties. These results provide greater mechanistic specificity in delineating human value-based behavior in social contexts and help parse the motivational relevance of the different facets that comprise interpersonal relationships.
个体对广义上的社会现象赋予价值这一观点已得到充分确立。尽管这一概念无处不在，但在人际关系背景下定义社会价值仍然难以捉摸。这一点值得注意，因为虽然人类社会行为的主流理论承认基于价值的过程的作用，但它们大多强调个体在给定环境中可能选择采取的行动的价值。相比之下，对于人类如何重视他们的人际关系知之甚少。为了解决这个问题，我们设计了一种方法，用于在几个独立样本（总共N = 1111）中构建社会价值的行为特征。我们借鉴经济学中的机会成本概念和数据驱动的定量方法，通过根据个体在资源有限时优先考虑一系列社会行为的可能性来获取和权衡这些行为，从而得出这一特征。我们研究了该特征在与特定关系伙伴（父母、亲密朋友和熟人）的自我报告社会行为中表达的强烈程度。社会价值得分与这些关系的其他方面（例如，关系质量、对失去关系伙伴的厌恶）相关，能够预测一系列任务中的决策偏好，并且显示出良好的心理测量特性。这些结果在描绘社会背景下基于人类价值的行为方面提供了更高的机制特异性，并有助于剖析构成人际关系的不同方面的动机相关性。
