Contingent social utility in the prisoners’ dilemma

We examined a central assumption of recent theories: that social utility is contingent on impressions of other people. We manipulated participants’ impression of the other player in a prisoners’ dilemma. We then measured participants’ own preferences in the PD, their estimates of the other player’s preferences in the PD, their prediction of the other player’s move, and their own move. We hypothesized that the participants’ move would maximize...