Cooperation, Fast and Slow

Abstract

Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does "rational" self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic cooperation games (total N = 17,647; no indication of publication bias using Egger's test, Begg's test, or p-curve). My meta-analysis was guided by the social heuristics hypothesis, which proposes that intuition favors behavior that typically maximizes payoffs, whereas deliberation favors behavior that maximizes one's payoff in the current situation. Therefore, this theory predicts that deliberation will undermine pure cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where there are few future consequences for one's actions, such that cooperating is not in one's self-interest) but not strategic cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where cooperating can maximize one's payoff). As predicted, the meta-analysis revealed 17.3% more pure cooperation when intuition was promoted over deliberation, but no significant difference in strategic cooperation between more intuitive and more deliberative conditions.

Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

“…Our key result, that people engage in less calculating behavior when their decision process is observable, provides the first evidence, to our knowledge, that people use uncalculating cooperation for reputational benefits, and not merely as a useful way to reduce the nonsocial costs of calculating (32)(33)(34)(35). Although a theory of uncalculating cooperation as merely an efficient decisionmaking strategy can explain our second and third results (individuals who cooperate across contexts to reduce the nonsocial costs of calculating will end up cooperating more, and thus should be perceived as, and should actually be, more trustworthy), it cannot explain why uncalculating decision-making should decrease when it is not observable.…”

“…Likewise, our third result (that uncalculating cooperators really are more trustworthy) confirms that it can be beneficial to trust uncalculating cooperators: they really do return more money in the TG, suggesting that uncalculating cooperation serves as an honest signal of trustworthiness. This work builds on the finding that intuitive decisions are typically more cooperative (35) by showing that intuitive cooperation in one decision (compared with more calculated cooperation) predicts trustworthiness in a future decision.…”

“…Or, relatedly, so long as cooperation is typically worthwhile, cooperating without calculating the costs can be an efficient "heuristic": it usually leads to the right decision, and avoids costs associated with calculating (e.g., cognitive costs of deliberation, or time and effort involved in gathering relevant information) (32)(33)(34), a proposal that is supported by empirical evidence (e.g., ref. 35). Here, however, we provide the first experimental evidence, to our knowledge, that uncalculating cooperation is more than just an efficient way to make cooperative decisions.…”

From good institutions to generous citizens: Top-down incentives to cooperate promote subsequent prosociality but not norm enforcement

“…The SHH provides an adaptive logic for spillovers: because deliberation is often costly, it can be advantageous to rely on cognitively efficient but inflexible social heuristics, especially when one must make decisions quickly or one is distracted or fatigued (for a formal evolutionary game theoretic demonstration, see Bear and Rand (2016)). Empirical support for the SHH comes, for example, from the observation that experimentally inducing participants to decide more deliberatively (or less intuitively) leads to less cooperation – as shown in a meta-analysis of 51 pure cooperation studies where cognitive processing mode was experimentally manipulated using cognitive load, time constraints, ego depletion, or intuition inductions (Rand, 2016b). …”

Taxing the brain to uncover lying? Meta-analyzing the effect of imposing cognitive load on the reaction-time costs of lying.

“…We used a broad definition of cognitive load (Rand, 2016), including an additional task, time pressure, ego depletion, stress, sleep deprivation, and a foreign language. Although obvious differences exist between the manipulations, they have all been theorized to tax the participant's executive functions.…”