Empathy or schadenfreude? Social value orientation and affective responses to gambling results

Social value orientation (SVO) refers to the social motivation that guides people to trade off interests between the self and others, which plays an important role in human prosocial behaviors. In this research, three studies were conducted to investigate whether people with high versus low SVO differ in their affective response to winning and losing in a gambling task when the gambler is a stranger (Study 1), when both oneself and strangers are the gamblers and social comparison is involved (Study 2) and when the gambler is a liked or disliked person (Study 3). The results show that when the gambler is a stranger (Study 1) or a liked person (Study 3), people manifest empathy regardless of their level of SVO. When the self is involved (Study 2) or when the target is a disliked person (Study 3), however, people with high SVO manifest empathy-like responses, but people with low SVO manifest schadenfreude. Overall, whether SVO influences affective responses to economic gain and loss depends on the gambling situation or the target person, thus enriching our understandings of humans' prosocial behaviors.