Detecting Cheaters without Thinking: Testing the Automaticity of the Cheater Detection Module

Jens Van Lier,Wim De Neys,Russell Revlin,Tiziana Zalla

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0053827

Abstract

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested that our brain is composed of evolved mechanisms. One extensively studied mechanism is the cheater detection module. This module would make people very good at detecting cheaters in a social exchange. A vast amount of research has illustrated performance facilitation on social contract selection tasks. This facilitation is attributed to the alleged automatic and isolated operation of the module (i.e., independent of general cognitive capacity). This study, using the selection task, tested the critical automaticity assumption in three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 established that performance on social contract versions did not depend on cognitive capacity or age. Experiment 3 showed that experimentally burdening cognitive resources with a secondary task had no impact on performance on the social contract version. However, in all experiments, performance on a non-social contract version did depend on available cognitive capacity. Overall, findings validate the automatic and effortless nature of social exchange reasoning.

Highlights

Half a century of reasoning and decision making research has shown that human thinking is often biased (e.g., [1])
This module is an adaptive algorithm in the brain that once activated causes individuals to automatically look for cheaters in social exchange
The first experiment examined the correlation between a measure of general cognitive capacity and selection task performance

Summary

Introduction

Half a century of reasoning and decision making research has shown that human thinking is often biased (e.g., [1]). In standard ‘social contract versions’ of the selection task 65–80% of individuals select the correct combination (P, not-Q) To explain this facilitation, Cosmides and Tooby [7] propose the existence of a cheater detection module. The cheater detection module is a domain-specific reasoning mechanism that helps people to detect cheaters and, should result in a clear performance boost for social contract versions of the selection task. If the cheater detection module is automatic and does not depend on available cognitive resources, even the cognitively least gifted individuals should manage to solve the social contract version correctly. If the cheater detection module operates automatically, performance on the social contract version can be expected to be relatively stable across age groups. If the cheater detection module operates automatically, performance should not decrease under cognitive load when solving the social contract version.

Methods

Results and Discussion

General Discussion