Abstract
Recently, researchers claimed that people are intuitively inclined to cooperate with reflection causing them to behave selfishly. Empirical support for this claim came from experiments using a 4-player public goods game with a marginal return of 0.5 showing that people contributed more money to a common project when they had to decide quickly (i.e., a decision based on intuition) than when they were instructed to reflect and decide slowly. This intuitive-cooperation effect is of high scientific and practical importance because it argues against a central assumption of traditional economic and evolutionary models. The first experiment of present study was set up to examine the generality of the intuitive-cooperation effect and to further validate the experimental task producing the effect. In Experiment 1, we investigated Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) workers' contributions to a 4-player public goods game with a marginal return of 0.5 while we manipulated the knowledge about the other players' contribution to the public goods game (contribution known vs. contribution unknown), the identity of the other players (humans vs. computers randomly generating contributions) and the time constraint (time pressure/intuition vs. forced delay/reflection). However, the results of Experiment 1 failed to reveal an intuitive-cooperation effect. Furthermore, four subsequent direct replications attempts with AMT workers (Experiments 2a, 2b, 2c and Experiment 3, which was conducted with naïve/inexperienced participants) also failed to demonstrate intuitive-cooperation effects. Taken together, the results of the present study could not corroborate the idea that people are intuitively cooperative, hence suggesting that the theoretical relationship between intuition and cooperation should be further scrutinized.
Highlights
Rand, Greene and Nowak [1] recently asked themselves the fundamental question ‘‘... whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ selfinterest.(pp. 428)’’
Consistent with the social heuristics hypothesis, Rand and colleagues found in a series of experimental and correlational studies that participants tend to behave more cooperatively under conditions promoting intuitive decision making than under conditions promoting reflective decision making
When participants interact with computers that randomly generate contributions to a common project, it is unlikely they will use the social heuristics to make their contribution
Summary
Greene and Nowak [1] recently asked themselves the fundamental question ‘‘... whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ selfinterest.(pp. 428)’’. Consistent with the social heuristics hypothesis, Rand and colleagues found in a series of experimental and correlational studies that participants tend to behave more cooperatively under conditions promoting intuitive decision making than under conditions promoting reflective decision making These findings are remarkable because they are clearly at variance with a historically influential philosophical position stating that people are self-centered acting socially only due to reflection/rational self-control. The findings argue against a central assumption in traditional evolutionary models and economic models that people should display consistent behavioral styles (either cooperative or non-cooperative) Contrary to these models Rand and colleagues’ findings suggest people can switch from one style to another dependent on their mind set (intuition vs reflection). It might not come as a surprise that Rand and colleagues ‘paper has attracted quite a lot of attention from the scientific community and from the popular press
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