Social Dilemmas 1 The Perceptions of Entitlement In Social Dilemmas

Social Dilemmas are situations in which personal interests are at odds with public or collective interests. For example public television is free for all to view. However, if nobody makes contributions or donations to public television it won’t be able to stay on the air. One variable that may influence a person to make a selfish or cooperative choice is whether or not they are given the opportunity to discuss the situation. Another variable that may influence a person’s decision is his or her perception of fairness. The purpose of the present study is to examine whether discussion will lead to more cooperative behaviors even among those led to believe they are entitled to win, or whether a sense of entitlement will override cooperation. In this study participants played a game that worked on the same principles as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the Prisoner’s Dilemma two participants choose to either cooperate, which is a task or choice that benefits both participants, or to defect, which is a task or choice that benefits them self more than the other participant. In this study participants were playing for large and small pieces of candy in one of four conditions, two conditions in which there was no discussion between participants and two conditions in which participants were allowed to discuss the game. The hypothesis of this study was that participants that were allowed to discuss would be more likely to defect if they felt some sense of entitlement to the large piece of candy. This sense of entitlement was created by a pre-test participants in this condition had to take to qualify to play for the large candy, the pre-test was loaded to make each participant believe that they had done extremely well on it and their partner had no