Abstract

We present an incentivized laboratory experiment where a random sample of individuals playing a series of stag hunt games are forced to make their choices under time constraints, while the rest of the players have no time limits to decide. We find that individuals under the time pressure treatment are more likely to play stag (vs. hare) than individuals in the control group: under time constraints 62.85% of players are stag-hunters as opposed to 52.32% when no time limits are imposed. These results offer the first experimental evidence on the role of intuition and deliberation in strategic situations that entail social coordination. In interpreting our findings, we provide a discussion on ruling social conventions in daily-life interactions.

Highlights

  • The recent literature in judgment and decision-making has shown an upsurge of interest to understand prosociality from a dual process perspective[1]

  • A prominent conceptual framework that looks at the relationships between the mode of reasoning and prosocial behavior is the so-called Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH, hereafter)[8,32]

  • Deliberation would occur when individuals resist the impulse to rely on social heuristics and reflect more deeply upon the situation at hand, choosing the payoff maximizing strategy case-by-case

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Summary

Introduction

The recent literature in judgment and decision-making has shown an upsurge of interest to understand prosociality from a dual process perspective[1]. Dual process theories of decision-making[2] are well established in cognitive and social psychology They suggest that humans make decisions under two modes of reasoning, namely intuition, fast and relying on heuristics, and deliberation, slow and based on careful scrutiny of costs and benefits[3,4,5]. Following this insights, a number of recent contributions have run incetivized experiments to investigate the effects that the mode of reasoning has on prosocial behavior in a variety of games[6,7], such as: prisoner dilemmas and public good games[8,9], dictator games[9,10,11], ultimatum games[12,13], deception games[14], and allocation decisions[15]. While response times are related to the mode of reasoning in important respects[23], the interpretation of results obtained under time pressure requires careful consideration[9,24]

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