AFFECTIVE AND COGNITIVE INFLUENCES IN A SOCIAL DILEMMA GAME

An experiment is reported that examines the effects of emotional mood and evaluative priming on cooperation in a social dilemma game. Unlike an associative-network account or an equity account of mood-dependent prosocial behaviour, the present approach assumes that the primary effect of elated mood is to increase behavioural variability rather than altruism or cooperation per se. Accordingly, a positively emotional state serves the function of freeing the individual from the need to optimize local profits and increasing the range of behavioural judgments and decisions. As a consequence, positive mood may sometimes produce a secondary increase of prosocial behaviour (especially when the normal behaviour is rigidly competitive) but positive mood may al other times lead to antisocial tendencies and transgression. The empirical findings are consistent with such an interpretation. Cooperation in a four-person dilemma game increases when positive connotations of cooperation and negative connotations of competition are primed in a preceding verbal learning task. However, the mood manipulation does not directly affect the decision to cooperate but only indirectly via increased variability. In fact, subjects in good mood make more cooperative as well as more competitive choices than people in bad mood The notable priming effect does not support the pessimistic view that the cooperation is largely determined by crystallized personality factors.