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Context frames such as describing a Prisoner's Dilemma as a “community” or a “stock exchange” game cause significant variation in cooperative behaviour. Here, we draw on recent advances in research on situation construal to propose that perceived conflict of interests is a mechanism underlying framing effects on cooperation in experimental games. Specifically, we argue that people readily think about situations in terms of conflicts of interests, and how people perceive the conflict of interests in different games predicts differences in cooperation across these games. In a formal model, we show that variation in perceived conflict of interests can affect cooperative decisions even when first-order beliefs and social preferences are static. We test this model across two studies (total N = 1615). In each study, we elicited situation perceptions and beliefs about others' behaviour in a framed game. The basic framing effect …