On perceiving morality and potency:Social values and the effects of person perception in a give‐some dilemma

The present study examines a two‐person give‐some dilemma characterized by the conflict between the pursuit of own benefits (not giving) and collective benefits (giving). The major purpose was two‐fold: (a) to examine the effects of person perceptions manipulated along the dimensions of morality (goodness) and potency (strength) on co‐operation, and (b) to examine whether pre‐existing differences between individuals in their preference for specific self‐other outcome distributions (social values) would modify the effects of person perception. First, we predicted and found that across social values the degree of co‐operative behaviour increased as a linear function of the extent to which the other was seen as moral. Concerning the perceptions in terms of potency, we found a significant quadratic trend; another seen as moderate on potency elicited more co‐operative behaviour than another seen as either high or low on potency. These effects of person perception were not moderated by social value. More interesting was the finding that even though persons classified as pro‐social (co‐operators and altruists) and pro‐self (individualists and competitors) held about the same expectation about the magnitude of another's co‐operation, pro‐socials behaved more co‐operatively than pro‐selfs. This suggests that under certain conditions behavioural differences between pro‐socials and pro‐selfs are not conditional upon expectational differences between those two social values