 (C denotes the strategy of cooperating with one’s opponent (i.e., refusing to confess) and D denotes the strategy of defecting on a deal with one’s opponent (i.e., confessing).) Many people find it incredible when a game theorist tells them that players designated with the honorific ‘rational’ must choose in this game in such a way as to produce the outcome (D,D). The explanation seems to require appeal to very strong forms of both descriptive and normative individualism. After all, if the players attached higher value to the social good (for their 2-person society of thieves) than to their individual welfare, they could then do better individually too; game-theoretic ‘rationality’, it is objected, yields behavior that is perverse even from the individually optimizing point of view. The players undermine their own welfare, one might argue, because they obstinately refuse to pay any attention to the social context of their  choices.Sugden (1993)  seems to have been the first to suggest that players who truly deserve to be called ‘rational’, including non-altruistic ones, would in the one-shot PD reason as a team, that is, would each arrive at their choices of strategies by asking ‘What is best for us?’ instead of ’What is best for me?’.