Team reasoning and collective rationality: Piercing the veil of obviousness

The experiments reported in our target article provide strong evidence of collective utility maximization, and the findings suggest that team reasoning should now be included among the social value orientations used in cognitive and social psychology. Evidential decision theory offers a possible alternative explanation for our results but fails to predict intuitively compelling strategy choices in simple games with asymmetric team-reasoning outcomes. Although many of our experimental participants evidently used team reasoning, some appear to have ignored the other players’ expected strategy choices and used lower-level, nonstrategic forms of reasoning. Standard payoff transformations cannot explain the experimental findings, nor team reasoning in general, without an unrealistic assumption that players invariably reason nonstrategically.