However, until we know more about the psychological mechanisms underlying these social value orientations we lack a good basis for interventions.

In addition to displaying participant's social value orientations, it also displays the dynamics of a mixed-motives situation.

There is a considerable literature on social value orientations which shows that people have stable preferences for how much they value outcomes for self versus others.

However, in 1973 Griesinger and Livingston provided a geometric framework of SVO (the SVO ring, see Figure 1) with which they could show that SVO is in principle not a categorical, but a continuous construct that allows for an infinite number of social value orientations.