ABSTRACT
This chapter underscores the way in which limitations are placed upon our judgments and actions by the interdependent character of the natural attitude. In the 1950s a mathematics professor at Princeton University, Albert Tucker, published a tantalizing formulation for what can happen to the natural attitude when doubt about the nature of a relationship between people is introduced by a third party. Tucker labelled it the prisoners' dilemma, and it has since become a significant puzzle, especially for those concerned with the manipulation of decision-making. Leon Festinger noted that, after making decisions, people tend to remain loyal to their choices. Dissonance normally results from finding oneself in the wrong regarding some set of decisions or assumptions one had previously made. Festinger found that students who were persuaded to tell other students that a boring experiment was really fun experienced dissonance. The conflict experiments of Kurt Lewin provide an interesting footnote to the experiments of Solomon Asch and Tucker.
