Abstract
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that deliberation is slow. These analyses keep track of the average time taken to make decisions under different conditions. Lacking any knowledge of the underlying dynamics, such simplistic approach might however lead to erroneous interpretations. Here we model the cognitive basis of strategic cooperative decision making using the Drift Diffusion Model to discern between deliberation and intuition and describe the evolution of the decision making in iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments. We find that, although initially people’s intuitive decision is to cooperate, rational deliberation quickly becomes dominant over an initial intuitive bias towards cooperation, which is fostered by positive interactions as much as frustrated by a negative one. However, this initial pro-social tendency is resilient, as after a pause it resets to the same initial value. These results illustrate the new insight that can be achieved thanks to a quantitative modelling of human behavior.
Highlights
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that deliberation is slow
Studies using fMRI scanners to monitor brain activity of human subjects participating in game theory experiments show that selfish participants will cooperate when they have incentive to cooperate: cooperation can be a result of longer deliberation, not just intuitive acts of pro-social individuals[12,13]
The fits have been performed using the HDDM python tool[30], which fits simultaneously the distribution of decision times for cooperative choices, defections, and the fraction of cooperation using Hierarchical Bayesian Estimation. (In Supplementary Fig. 4) we provide the R2 values of all the fits proposed in this paper.)
Summary
What is intuitive: pro-social or anti-social behaviour? To answer this fundamental question, recent studies analyse decision times in game theory experiments under the assumption that intuitive decisions are fast and that deliberation is slow. It represents a view complementary to other models describing the subject’s actions It focus on the shorter timescale[18] of neurobiology rather than attempting at finding the cause of observed behavior as a consequence of natural selection (e.g. evolutionary dynamics), learning process (e.g. operant conditioning), or of the individuals’ strategies (e.g. conditional cooperation[19], which important role in the multilayer experiment studied in this paper has already been described[20]). It has in particular the unique feature of precisely outlining the statistics of decision times, while it is intrinsically limited in its ability of identifying the causes of single actions taken
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