Several Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) studies have now shown that incentive magnitude has little effect upon average cooperation levels. This finding has prompted some investigators to conclude that the typical tise of trivial payoffs does not jeopardize the meaning of previous PD findings. The present experiment was undertaken to examine the tenability of this conclusion. Eighty male undergraduates served as subjects in a 10-ttial PD game. Two levels of incentive, pennies and dollars, were crossed with two levels of instruction, traditional and comprehensive. Average cooperation levels did not differ across the four experimental conditions. High incentives, however, produced significantly greater interdyad variance than low incentives. The difference in variance between instruction conditions was not significant. Reliability coefficients for the task and measures of response latency suggest that the increase in variance for high incentives was true variance, rather than error variance. Results suggest that generalization from PD studies using trivial incentives should be limited to behavior in parlor games.
The present experiment used a signal detection analysis to examine the selfperception notion that reliance on external behavioral and situational cues is an inverse function of the distinctiveness of available internal memory cues. Using Bern's light paradigm, internal cue distinctiveness was varied by requiring the subject to cross out meaningless trigrams in addition to the words used by Bern in the task phase of his experiment. After a training session in which two colored lights were established as discriminative stimuli for selfcredibility, the subject stated aloud that he had crossed out certain words and trigrams and had not crossed out others. Half of these statements were true, half were false, and each was made in the presence of one of the two lights. The predicted Statement X Light Cues interaction effect occurred only for recall of operations performed on trigrams. In that condition, false statements emitted in the presence of the "truth light" resulted in poorer recall performance than false statements emitted in the presence of the "lie light"; similarly, true statements emitted in the presence of the lie light resulted in poorer recall performance than true statements emitted in the presence of the truth light. There were no differences in the subjects' confidence in their recall accuracy across conditions. These data provided partial support for the hypothesis concerning internal cue distinctiveness. Both differential guessing rates and Maslach's "vigilance effect" were ruled out as possible contributors to these findings.
Arrowood, Wood and Ross (1970) found observer-Ss unable to reproduce the beliefs of target persons in an anticipatory effort-justification paradigm. Two experiments test the possibility that this finding is the result of an inappropriate instruction set and an experimental situation -which gave observers indirect access to internal cues of die target persons. Using the Arrowood et al. instructions, observer-Ss in the first experiment failed to reproduce targets* beliefs. When slightly altered instructions were employed, another group of observer-Ss successfully reproduced targets' beliefs. In a second experiment observers were given altered instructions but not allowed to participate as Ss in the experimental situation. These non-involved observers failed to reproduce the beliefs of target persons. Implications of these procedural artifacts are discussed with regard to the Arrowood et al. study and to simulations in general.
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