Two experiments investigated the impact of social motives or individuals' preferences for specific self-other outcome distributions, on behaviour in an n-person game. Subjects' social motives (altruistic, cooperative, individualistic, competitive)

The present research examined the influence of the objective interdependence structure of tasks, the values of decision makers, and others' strategies on social decision making and judgment. We observed that subjects' preferences among outcome alternatives that influenced both their own and another's welfare were strongly conditioned by their value orientations and by their expectations concerning the other person's choice behavior. As anticipated, there was no main effect for task structure, but structure interacted with value and with the other's strategy to influence choice behavior. Further, we observed that subjects judged others pursuing a tit-for-tat or a cooperative strategy as fairer and more honest than those pursuing a competitive strategy. They judged others pursuing a tit-for-tat strategy as more intelligent and stronger than those playing cooperatively or competitively.

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Personality can be defined from a social standpoint as a more or less consistent system of orientations that influences an individual's decisions and behaviors regarding the allocation of resources to self and others. One of the more robust models for the measurement of an individual's interpersonal utilities is McClintock's social value approach (McClintock, 1972). In the present study, we evaluate the construct of social value by testing the hypothesis that the cognitive processing time of subjects should vary systematically as a function of the type of social value being expressed. Towards this end, the Ring Measure of Social Values (Liebrand, 1984) was administered to 61 male and 124 female subjects. As predicted, cooperators and competitors were observed to have longer response latencies than altruists and individualists. In addition, a Social Value by Outcome Structure interaction was observed, and explained by assuming that cooperators are more hesitant in making decisions involving negative outcomes for others, whereas competitors are more reluctant to assign positive outcomes to others. These research findings add further evidence regarding the validity to the construct of social value.

Subjects in Santa Barbara, California, and Groningen, The Netherlands, participated in a seven-person social dilemma game, presented in terms of a conservation of resources problem. Prior to their decision making in the social dilemma game, subject's social motive (altruistic, cooperative, individualistic, competitive) was assessed by means of two different classification procedures. On the basis of previous research findings American subjects were expected to display relatively more competitive social motives, and Dutch subjects relatively more cooperative ones. However, no indications of crosscultural differences were found neither with regard to the distribution of social motives nor with regard to the amount of resources taken for self in the social dilemma game. In both locations, competitive subjects took most resources for self, individualistic subjects took next most, cooperative subjects took less than individualists, and altruistic subjects took the least. In addition to predictive validity, indices of the convergent validity of two social motive assessment procedures were described.