Z:gnu-www-ja-frank--4a2876-As part of the exit questionna/en

As part of the exit questionnaire that tested our subjects' understanding of the payoffs associated with different combinations of choices, we also asked them to state their reasons for making the choices they did. We hypothesized that economists would be more inclined to construe the objective of the game in self-interested terms, and therefore more likely to refer exclusively to features of the game itself when describing reasons for their choices. By contrast, we expected the noneconomists to be more open to alternative ways of interpreting the game, and thus more likely to look to their partners for cues about how to play. Accordingly, we expected noneconomists to refer more often to their feelings about their partners, aspects of human nature, and so on. This is precisely the pattern we found. Among the sample of economics students, 31% made exclusive reference to features of the game itself in explaining their chosen strategies, as compared with only 17% of the noneconomists. The probability of obtaining such divergent responses by chance is less than .05.