Cooperators and Competitors in Conflict: A Test of The “Triangle Model”

Kelley and Stahelski's “triangle model” describes differences in the perceptions and behaviors of cooperative versus competitive personality types and has important implications for theories of social influence and conflict. However, the generality of the model has been seriously questioned, data exist that seem to contradict some of its basic predictions, and the findings can be “conceptualized in terms of an alternative information-processing approach. To test predictions of the triangle model against those derived from the alternative, 158 male and female subjects were classified as cooperators or noncooperators, paired with a cooperative or noncooperative partner, and participated in a mixed-motive game that had a cooperative or competitive payoff structure. The results largely supported the predictions of the triangle model and showed high general-izability across situational demands and subject's sex. Noncooperators expected others to be primarily competitive, misidentified cooperative opponents, and their other perceptions were unaffected by the situation or partner. Cooperators were more flexible in that they expected others to have diverse dispositions, based their inferences about the opponent on the opponent's behavior, and their other perceptions were affected by the situation and partner. Minor revisions of the triangle model were suggested to account for mutual behavioral assimilation in mixed-disposition pairs and other anomalous data.