Speaking the Same Language

Abstract

The long history of experimental research on the prisoner's dilemma (PD) has primarily used a methodology that eliminates cues to participants. Researchers, however, have interpreted participants' choices as cooperative or competitive. The authors' research shows that giving participants researchers' interpretive labels of the game, the choices, and the outcomes, compared to no labels, led to significantly more cooperation; labels such as trust and cooperate/defect augmented cooperation even more. A second experiment found that independent evaluations of the labels led to perceptions that were similar to individuals' choices in the first experiment. These results suggest that we might need to rethink the import of many of our previous findings and their applicability to everyday interactions.