From game theory to real life: How social value orientation affects willingness to sacrifice in ongoing close relationships.

Abstract

This research adopted an interdependence analysis of sacrifice, examining the link between commitment (i.e., the subjective experience of dependence and long-term orientation) and willingness to sacrifice in ongoing close relationships, and determining whether this link is moderated by preexisting individual differences in social value orientation (i.e., prosocial, individualistic, or competitive orientation).Consistent with hypotheses, results of 2 studies revealed both that willingness to sacrifice was associated with greater commitment and that this link was more pronounced among individualists than among prosocials.Results also revealed an association between one's own willingness to sacrifice and beliefs regarding the partner's willingness to sacrifice (this link was somewhat more pronounced among prosocials than among individualists) and one's own willingness to sacrifice and actual partner's willingness to sacrifice.Individuals involved in close relationships sometimes find il necessary, important, and to some degree desirable to forego immediate personal well-being and engage in some form of self-sacrifice (e.g., spending less time with one's own friends; moving to a somewhat undesirable city for the sake of a partner's career).What makes individuals willing to forego immediate self-interest and engage in self-sacrificial activities?To what extent can willingness to sacrifice be understood in terms of considerations of long-term personal well-being or concern with the partner's well-being?And to what extent can such basic motivational processes be understood in terms of relatively stable personality differences?During the past several decades, such questions have been addressed in the context of game theory, a literature focusing on how individuals solve different conflicts of interest (cf.