Social Anxiety, Competition, and the Prisoner's Dilemma Game

Tone and colleagues (2018) found that individuals with high levels of social anxiety had a tendency to engage with their co-players in a less cooperative manner than did less anxious players during the Prisoner's Dilemma (PD) Game. From an evolutionary perspective, this finding could reflect socially anxious people’s desire to appear dominant in social settings so they can prevent their status from slipping below that of those around them (Gilbert & Trower, 1989). It could also be associated with a tendency to experience more negative emotion during interactions that could be competitive. If we only examine behavior, we can do no more than speculate about motivation or emotional experience. Therefore, in the present study, we examined associations between self-reported motivations for behavior (competitive, cooperative, or neutral) during the PD game and self-reported anger and stress after games ended. We hypothesized that people with higher levels of social anxiety would be more likely to play the game competitively than would low-anxious peers. We also predicted that participants who were both highly competitive and anxious would report higher levels of stress and anger than would other players. In this study, 122 college students completed self-report surveys evaluating social anxiety, played the Prisoner’s Dilemma game, and completed self-report measures regarding their motivations for strategies of play and their emotional experiences during and after games.  Using a between subjects design, we conducted two 2 x 3 ANOVAs to examine the main effects of social anxiety (high, low) and motivation (competitive, cooperative, neutral) on anger and stress ratings. We also examined the interaction between social anxiety and motivation as a predictor. Unexpectedly, our analysis revealed no significant main effects or interactions (all p’s > .05). Discoveries from this study demonstrate the need for a more in-depth understanding of the effects of social anxiety in competitive environments.