The assumption of the present research was that ownership of an object causes the owner to treat the object as a social entity because ownership creates a psychological association between the object and the owner. Three experiments investigated whether Ss would evaluate an object more favorably merely because they owned it, a bias analogous to other self-serving biases people display. Study 1 confirmed the existence of this mere ownership effect. Study 2 showed that the effect was not due to Ss having greater exposure to an owned object relative to an unowned object. Study 3 showed that the effect may be a specific instance of a general tendency of people to make self-enhancing judgments.

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Social values refer to stable preferences for certain patterns of outcomes to oneself and others (Mc-Clintock, 1972, 1978. Recent research indicates that people with different social values perceive the cooperative-competitive distinction differently. Cooperators see it as an evaluative, good-bad dimension, whereas noncooperators see it as a dynamic, strong-weak dimension (Liebrand, Jansen, Ryken, & Suhre, 1986). We found behavioral support for this principle in that cooperators and competitors displayed different egocentric biases. In Study 1 we expected cooperators to display an egocentric bias by associating themselves with good (cooperative) behaviors and by associating others with bad (competitive) behaviors. Noncooperators, not perceiving cooperation-competition as evaluative, should not display this association as strongly. We had subjects write lists of cooperative and competitive behaviors that either they or others did. Cooperators showed an egocentric bias; competitors did not. In Study 2 a different group of subjects rated a subset of behaviors produced in Study 1. When using an evaluative (good-bad) scale, the behaviors written by cooperators were rated more extremely than the behaviors written by competitors. Contrary to expectations, when using a potency (strong-weak) dimension, behaviors written by competitors were not rated more extremely than the behaviors written by cooperators.Social values refer to stable preferences for certain patterns of outcomes to oneself and others (McClintock, 1972(McClintock, , 1978.Through the use of a measurement procedure involving decomposed games (e.g., Messick & McClintock, 1968), individuals can be classified into distinct groups on the basis of those preferences. The three values that have received the most empirical and theoretical attention are (a) cooperation, characterized by a preference to maximize the joint outcome between two people; (b) competition, maximizing one's relative advantage against another person; and (c) individualism, the tendency to maximize one's own outcome without regard to the outcomes of others (e.g., Bern & Lord, 1979).Previous research has shown that actors' social values can influence behavior in two-person mixed-motive game settings

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, metaphors have been revered by scholars in all disciplines for their unsurpassed epistemological value. In this article, the authors review the role of the metaphor in the acquisition of knowledge and advancement of science, with specific emphasis on the ways in which metaphors have informed theory and research in social dilemmas. In highlighting the abundance and variety of social dilemma metaphors, the authors focus on metaphors' role in suggesting fresh theoretical perspectives, novel methodological approaches, and new insights with regard to solutions and practical applications. They suggest promising directions for future research and offer strategies for taking further advantage of the special relationship between metaphors and social dilemmas.The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.-Aristotle Metaphor is a way of knowing-one of the oldest, most deeply embedded, even indispensable ways known in the history of human consciousness.-Robert Nisbet Perhaps no research area in the social sciences boasts a richer menagerie of metaphorical images than does the area of social dilemmas. Originally conceptualized as a game (Luce & Raiffa, 1957), a social dilemma situation has since been compared with a train ride (