The Person and the Situation

by Lee Ross

the famous experiments of Kelley and Stahelski (1970) using a “Prisoner’s Dilemma” paradigm. In their experiments, two subjects, unable to see or communicate with each other, had to choose whether to make cooperative or noncooperative responses on each of several consecutive trials. The relevant “payoff matrices” were presented to the participants: When both subjects chose the cooperative response, both received a modest payoff. When one chose the cooperative and the other the competitive response, the latter received a high payoff and the former suffered a large loss. When both chose the competitive response, both suffered a moderate loss. Different subjects, however, construed the situation in different ways. To some, it was obvious that the sensible strategy was to play the cooperative response as much as possible so as to settle into a pattern of modest gain along with one’s partner. Such subjects (as would be expected from people’s tendency to assume that others share their construal of situations, and from their resulting tendency to overestimate consensus for their own behavior) overwhelmingly estimated that other subjects would see the object of the game in the same way and play cooperatively. To other subjects, it was equally obvious that the situation would reward “defection” more than cooperation, and they played accordingly, assuming that their partner would see things the same way.