The Psychological and Economical Perspectives on Human Decisions in Social and Interactive Contexts

________________________________________ In recent years many social scientists have come to realize the value of a theoretical framework that uses traditional game-theoretic concepts to model the environment in which decisions are made, and of meticulous and careful experimental work on interactive decisions. Our common hope is that a combination of these two components would lead to breakthroughs and new insights on human behavior under various (natural or artificially induced) incentive structures. This goal has been a major driving force of Rapoport's work for a long time (Kahan & Rapoport 1984; Rapoport 1990) and it is fitting that the workshop in his honor focuses on the most recent developments toward this goal. Most chapters in this volume summarize experimental studies designed to explore to what degree nonstandard motives (e.g., fairness, pride, retaliation, trust, etc.) guide human behavior in strategic settings (modeled by games), and how people learn to adapt to the objective incentive structure. This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by discussing some of the traditional differences between psychologists and economists in the study of human choice behavior.