Me, you, and us: Distinguishing “egoism,” “altruism,” and “groupism”

Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning

Decision theory and game theory rest on a fundamental assumption that players seek to maximize their individual utilities, but in some interactive decisions it seems intuitively reasonable to aim to maximize the utility of the group of players as a whole. Such team reasoning requires collective preferences and a distinctive mode of reasoning from preferences to decisions. Findings from two experiments provide evidence for collective preferences and team reasoning. In lifelike vignettes (Experiment 1) and abstract games (Experiment 2) with certain structural properties, most players preferred team-reasoning strategies to strategies supporting unique Nash equilibria, although individually rational players should choose equilibrium strategies. These findings suggest that team reasoning predicts strategy choices more powerfully than orthodox game theory in some games.

Collective preferences in strategic decisions

In the theories of team reasoning of Sugden and Bacharach, players are assumed to be motivated in some circumstances to maximize collective rather than individual utilities. An experiment was performed to assess whether preferences underlying such collective payoff maximization occur. An opportunistic sample of 50 undergraduate and graduate students, 7 men and 43 women ages 19 to 42 years (M= 23.0, SD=5.4), expressed preferences among the outcomes of strategic decisions presented in vignettes designed to engage social value orientations of individualism, altruism, competitiveness, equality seeking, or collective preferences. In the vignettes designed to engage collective preferences, and significantly less frequently in the other vignettes, preferences were biased toward outcomes maximizing collective payoffs, and respondents invariably gave team-reasoning explanations for their preferences. These results provide evidence for collective preferences according to theories of team reasoning and empirical support for one of the essential assumptions of these theories.