Social Environment Shapes the Speed of Cooperation.

Akihiro Nishi,David G Rand,Anthony M Evans,Nicholas A Christakis,A James O’Malley

doi:10.1038/srep29622

Abstract

Are cooperative decisions typically made more quickly or slowly than non-cooperative decisions? While this question has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most research has focused on one-shot interactions. Yet it is repeated interactions that characterize most important real-world social interactions. In repeated interactions, the cooperativeness of one’s interaction partners (the “social environment”) should affect the speed of cooperation. Specifically, we propose that reciprocal decisions (choices that mirror behavior observed in the social environment), rather than cooperative decisions per se, occur more quickly. We test this hypothesis by examining four independent decision time datasets with a total of 2,088 subjects making 55,968 decisions. We show that reciprocal decisions are consistently faster than non-reciprocal decisions: cooperation is faster than defection in cooperative environments, while defection is faster than cooperation in non-cooperative environments. These differences are further enhanced by subjects’ previous behavior – reciprocal decisions are faster when they are consistent with the subject’s previous choices. Finally, mediation analyses of a fifth dataset suggest that the speed of reciprocal decisions is explained, in part, by feelings of conflict – reciprocal decisions are less conflicted than non-reciprocal decisions, and less decision conflict appears to lead to shorter decision times.

Highlights

Understanding the evolution of cooperation has been a major focus of research for decades[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
This work focused primarily, on one-shot games, asking if cooperative decisions are faster than defection decisions. These studies have produced inconsistent results: many find that cooperation is faster than defection[21,22,24,27,28,29], others report the opposite pattern20,23,26. (Importantly, here we are referring to work examining correlations between decision speed and cooperation, rather than experimental manipulations of decision speed where the results are much more consistent: a recent meta-analysis of 51 manipulation studies with over 17,000 total participants shows that experimentally inducing intuitive decision-making has a clear positive effect on cooperation in 1-shot games33)
Our results show that when subjects are deciding in the unknown environment, there is a negative relationship between decision time and cooperation across the four studies (Fig. 1, left)

Summary

Introduction

Understanding the evolution of cooperation has been a major focus of research for decades[1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13]. This work focused primarily, on one-shot games, asking if cooperative decisions are faster (or slower) than defection decisions. These studies have produced inconsistent results: many find that cooperation is faster than defection[21,22,24,27,28,29], others report the opposite pattern. (Importantly, here we are referring to work examining correlations between decision speed and cooperation, rather than experimental manipulations of decision speed (or cognitive processing more generally) where the results are much more consistent: a recent meta-analysis of 51 manipulation studies with over 17,000 total participants shows that experimentally inducing intuitive decision-making has a clear positive effect on cooperation in 1-shot games[33]).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion