When "false consensus" stops being "false": An experimental study with one-shot prisoner's dilemma

Abstract

An experiment was conducted to investigate social implications of false consensus effect (what results will occurred at the group level when individuals act on their false consensus) in a "selective-play" situation. The results demonstrated that, under specified situations (in the selective-play situation, derived from Orbell and Dawes, 1993, and in the situation where it is difficult to predict partners' action, derived from Yamagishi and Yamagishi (1994)), the behavior of subjects who acted on their false consensus changed the situation such that their expectations about partners' cooperativeness was no longer "false." This is because cooperative subjects were able to find other cooperative subjects in the selective-play situation. The results further suggested that having a false consensus about partners' cooperativeness provided an advantage in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma situation.