A “scenario” might, for example, identify one of the players as “aggressor”; it might give the outcomes of previous plays of the same game by other players; it might give a background story that would tend to identify some particular division of the terrain as corresponding to an original “status quo”; or it might seem to attach a kind of moral claim of one of the players to particular parts of the board. These background data would have no influence on the logical or mathematical structure of the game; they would be intended to have no force except power of suggestion. Again, one might set up the board so that on the first play it corresponds to the way it stood in the middle of the same game as played earlier by two other players, and see whether the outcome can be affected by informing the players of what the starting lineup was in that earlier game. If players tend to develop “norms” based on the static configuration of the game as they appreciate it at the outset, it may be possible to distort those norms by providing, in a completely “non-authoritative” way, a background story that suggestively indicates some other hypothetical starting point.

SEED: Suggests an essay experiment on how suggestive framing — even explicitly non-authoritative — shapes people's sense of fairness and baseline norms in negotiation or game theory.

Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, loc. 380