Social interaction basis of cooperators' and competitors' beliefs about others

Based on results from previous experiments using the Prisoner's Dilemma game, it is inferred that cooperators will believe others are heterogeneous as to their cooperativeness vs. competitiveness, whereas competitors will believe other persons are uniformly competitive. Evidence relating to authoritarianism, and from a variety of experimental situations is found to confirm this inference. Low authoritarians tend to behave like cooperators in experimental game situations and to have beliefs about other persons similar to the cooperators' beliefs, whereas high authoritarians exhibit behavior and beliefs consistent with those of competitors. Results illustrate what may be a common phenomenon in personality and social psychology, that a personality predisposition acts through its influence upon the person's social behavior to determine the information he gains from his social environment and, thereby, the beliefs he comes to hold about his world. This analysis provides an explanation in terms of social interaction processes for a "projection" phenomenon previously explained almost exclusively in terms of psychodynamic processes. (43 ref.)