Relationship of Three Motives to Choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma
23 Ss each played 24 trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma Game against a confederate who mimicked their previous responses. Before each trial, Ss wrote briefly about their conscious thoughts and motivations. These written responses were scored for cooperativeness-competitiveness, trust-mistrust, and economic rationality. Correlations between response measures indicated that A-responses (allowing maximum joint earnings) were strongly influenced by both cooperativeness and trust but that B-responses (allowing maximum individual earnings) did not have as strong a relation to competitiveness. Analysis of differences among religious groups suggested that B-responses may sometimes measure economic rationality more strongly than either competitiveness or mistrust. The study suggests that the A-B response dichotomy may not always be coincident with a cooperative-competitive or trust-mistrust dichotomy.