Social dilemma research has paid much attention to decision making in socially interdependent situations. Considerably less attention has been focused on preferences people have for the types of situations they want to be involved in. This question relates to the ecological validity of social dilemma research, as natural interactions often afford a choice between situations with different interdependence structures. The present paper is based on work begun at the University of Warsaw by Janusz Grzelak and his students (1982), which was theoretically grounded in work by Kelley and Thibaut (1978) quantifying five types of outcome control in matrix games: Autonomy, Respect, Dominance, Passivity, and Collaboration. Since 1982 collaborators from Warsaw, Delaware and Japan built on Grzelak's work, which led to the Control Orientations Inventory (COI) as a measure of preferences for these five types of control. We have established the validity of the COI measure concurrently in these three countries.