The Frames Behind the Games: Player's Perceptions of Prisoner's Dilemma, Chicken, Dictator, and Ultimatum Games

The tension between cooperative and competitive impulses is an eternal issue for every society. But how is this problem perceived by individual participants in the context of a behavioral games experiment? We first assess individual differences in players’ propensity to cooperate in a series of experimental games. We then use openended interviews with a subset of those players to investigate the various concepts (or ‘frames’) they used when thinking about self-interested and cooperative actions. More generally, we hope to raise awareness of player’s perceptions of experimental environments to inform both the design and interpretation of experiments and experimental data.