American Research Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

This paper demonstrates how social bargaining games can be used to study a broad range of study areas the prisoner’s dilemma,‖ basic methodological instructions, and a sample study to demonstrate the utility of the prisoner’s dilemma game in the social sciences and humanities. We examined participants’ emotional responses to situations that produce conflict. We manipulated outcomes within the prisoner’s dilemma by creating three sub-outcomes within the ―sucker’s payoff‖ outcome. Each sub-outcome had different payoff structures and participants were asked to imagine that they were the victims of the other player’s strategy to defect. We posit three possible hypotheses why participants should feel anger toward the other player: (1) the other player violated the participants’ autonomy by defecting; (2) the participants felt frustrated because the other player blocked the participants’ goal of attaining money, and (c) the participants perceived the payoffs as unfair relative to the other player. We obtained results that supported the hypothesis that participants perceived the payoffs as unfair.