It was predicted thai Ss facing the prospect of poor task performance would attempt to bias the task supervisor through Ingratiation (conforming to him, emphasizing self-attributes admired by him, flattering him) if the supervisor had some freedom to modify his standards or their application. The form of this ingratiation was expected to hinge on the expressed values of the supervisor. The results showed that opinion conformity was affected by the supervisor's stated values and this was true only when the supervisor was potentially open to influence. Also, in the open-to-influence conditions Ss tried to impress the supervisor by presenting themselves as strong and competent. There was no evidence of differential flattery as a function of experimental treatment.
Recent criticism of research using the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) game suggests that previously obtained results may be seen as an artifact of the typical use of "trivial" monetary incentives in the game. Critics propose that PD subjects under imaginary or trivial incentive conditions compete primarily because they become bored with cooperation. The present experiment varied incentive magnitude for subjects playing the same basic 20-trial PD game. In five experimental conditions, subjects played for imaginary dollars, small and intermediate amounts of real money, and real dollars. Results indicated that: (a) Cooperation tended to decrease over time in all conditions; (6) subjects who played for real money played quite competitively regardless of incentive magnitude; and (c) subjects who played for real dollars were significantly more, rather than less, competitive than were subjects who played for imaginary dollars. The results were interpreted as failing to support the "insufficient incentive to cooperate" criticisms.
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