Cooperative Choice in Decomposed Social Dilemmas

In a study by Pruitt (1967) two-person decomposed prisoner's dilemma games (DPDs) were constructed from a 2 X 2 prisoner's dilemma game. Pruitt showed that some DPDs evoked greater cooperation than others, despite the fact that the payoffs were identical in all of the games. Pruitt's findings were interpreted in terms of Hamburger's (1973) "take-some" and "give-some" games, and it was hypothesized that DPDs in which the cooperative choice rewards the other members of the group would evoke greater cooperation than DPDs in which the competitive choice punishes the other members. This hypothesis was tested with three-person DPDs with college students as subjects. The results support the hypothesis and several explanations of the findings are discussed.