Social game theory: Preferences, perceptions, and choices

ABSTRACT

Building on classic game theory, psychologists have explored the effects of social preferences and expectations on strategic behaviour. Ordinary social perceivers are sensitive to additional contextual factors not addressed by game theory and its recent psychological extensions. We review the results of a research programme exploring how observers judge “players” (i.e., individuals making strategic decisions in social dilemmas) on the dimensions of competence and morality. We explore social perception in several well-known dilemmas, including the prisoner’s dilemma, the volunteer’s dilemma, and the trust dilemma. We also introduce a novel self-presentational dilemma. In research conducted over a decade and a half, we have found that judgements of competence are sensitive to both players’ choices and the dilemma’s (expected and actual) outcomes. In contrast, judgements of morality respond strongly to players’ behaviour and little else. We discuss how these social-perceptual patterns might affect expectations, preferences, and strategic choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Social dilemmas
• social perception
• reputation
• cooperation
• moral judgement

Acknowledgments

We thank Pat Barclay and Max Krasnow for comments on a draft of this manuscript.

Notes

¹ An efficiency constraint of 2R > (T + S) ensures that two cooperators do collectively better than a cooperator-defector pair.

² Appendix B shows payoff matrices for the prisoner’s dilemma and other games studied in this research, but not for the assurance game or the game of chicken.

³ Use of the term “psychological distance” or “social distance” is a convenient if imprecise terminological shortcut to capture a multiplicity of ways in which individuals are separated from one another. A low distance may, for example, indicate frequent exposure to and high familiarity with one another, or it may refer to the degree of genetic relatedness or the degree of interdependence in one’s outcomes.

⁴ Some of the samples used in the earlier studies are rather small and limited in terms of the diversity of the subject pool. Yet, positive replications within the research program were achieved for all effects of interest. There are no unpublished studies in our file drawers.

⁵ This effect was marginally significant, p =.09.

⁶ The effect sizes in Krueger and DiDonato (2010) were reported as partial η². Using a formula recommended by Cohen (1988, pp. 279–280), we converted these indices to the more familiar d metric.