A five-factor integrative taxonomy of strategic reasoning in dyadic games

Across two studies, we used verbal protocol analysis to develop a taxonomy of reasoning in dyadic matrix games. Participants were instructed to think aloud as they made decisions in the games. Their comments were recorded, audio files transcribed and the results analysed using a grounded theory approach. Five main strategic reasoning factors emerged: (1) motivation (social value orientations); (2) processing style (global-analytic vs. local focus); (3) perspective taking (number of steps of iterated perspective taking); (4) regulatory focus (promotion-seeking vs. prevention-seeking) and (5) mental representation (gist vs. verbatim representation). Our findings corroborate some elements of previous decision research, and they also suggest that no single existing theory can account for the multimodal reasoning factors found to underlie reasoning even in relatively simple games. We propose a new, five-factor integrative strategic reasoning taxonomy to explain choices in dyadic games.