Abstract
Is collaboration the fast choice for humans? Past studies proposed that cooperation is a behavioural default, based on Response Times (RT) findings. Here we contend that the individual’s reckoning of the immediate social environment shapes her predisposition to cooperate and, hence, response latencies. In a social dilemma game, we manipulate the beliefs about the partner’s intentions to cooperate and show that they act as a switch that determines cooperation and defection RTs; when the partner’s intention to cooperate is perceived as high, cooperation choices are speeded up, while defection is slowed down. Importantly, this social context effect holds across varying expected payoffs, indicating that it modulates behaviour regardless of choices’ similarity in monetary terms. Moreover, this pattern is moderated by individual variability in social preferences: Among conditional cooperators, high cooperation beliefs speed up cooperation responses and slow down defection. Among free-riders, defection is always faster and more likely than cooperation, while high cooperation beliefs slow down all decisions. These results shed new light on the conflict of choices account of response latencies, as well as on the intuitive cooperation hypothesis, and can help to correctly interpret and reconcile previous, apparently contradictory results, by considering the role of context in social dilemmas.
Highlights
Human cooperation –sacrificing individual resources to achieve higher collective welfare– poses an evolutionary puzzle in both social and natural sciences: even if selfishness leads to higher evolutionary fitness, cooperation is widespread among humans[1,2,3]
The results of the present study suggest that the social context created by beliefs regarding the partner’s intention to cooperate has an important impact on determining the speed of cooperation and defection decisions
High cooperation beliefs create a cooperative immediate social environment for conditional cooperators where cooperation decisions are fast at the expense of steep speed costs for defection decisions
Summary
Human cooperation –sacrificing individual resources to achieve higher collective welfare– poses an evolutionary puzzle in both social and natural sciences: even if selfishness leads to higher evolutionary fitness, cooperation is widespread among humans[1,2,3]. Researchers have studied the Response Times (RT) of choices in social dilemma decisions (i.e. situations where private and social interests are in conflict) to address whether cooperation is the fast, unconflicted choice among humans (please note that quick choice speed has been taken to indicate the default or intuitive behaviour[4,5,6,7], this interpretation is not always conclusive) This method has produced mixed results; while several studies found that individuals make cooperation choices significantly faster than selfish choices[4,5,6,7,8], others reported the opposite pattern[9,10,11]. We hypothesize that whether cooperation will be the unconflicted, fast choice in a social dilemma situation will depend on the social environment which is set by individual’s cooperation beliefs about other agents
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