Abstract
Cooperation is essential for the success of societies and there is an ongoing debate whether individuals have therefore developed a general spontaneous tendency to cooperate or not. Findings that cooperative behavior is related to shorter decision times provide support for the spontaneous cooperation effect, although contrary results have also been reported. We show that cooperative behavior is better described as person × situation interaction, in that there is a spontaneous cooperation effect for prosocial but not for proself persons. In three studies, one involving population representative samples from the US and Germany, we found that cooperation in a public good game is dependent on an interaction between individuals’ social value orientation and decision time. Increasing deliberation about the dilemma situation does not affect persons that are selfish to begin with, but it is related to decreasing cooperation for prosocial persons that gain positive utility from outcomes of others and score high on the related general personality trait honesty/humility. Our results demonstrate that the spontaneous cooperation hypothesis has to be qualified in that it is limited to persons with a specific personality and social values. Furthermore, they allow reconciling conflicting previous findings by identifying an important moderator for the effect.
Highlights
Cooperation is essential for the success of societies and there is an ongoing debate whether individuals have developed a general spontaneous tendency to cooperate or not
Previous experience with the experimental setting of social dilemma games has been found to reduce the effect[4], and on theoretical[9] and empirical[10,11] grounds it can be expected that other situational factors that influence the activation of social norms such as situation framing affect spontaneous behavior as well
We guide the perspective towards social value orientation (SVO), which is a continuous measure of social preferences and can be expected to be an important moderator for the spontaneous cooperation hypothesis on theoretical grounds[3,12,13]
Summary
Cooperation is essential for the success of societies and there is an ongoing debate whether individuals have developed a general spontaneous tendency to cooperate or not. Our results demonstrate that the spontaneous cooperation hypothesis has to be qualified in that it is limited to persons with a specific personality and social values They allow reconciling conflicting previous findings by identifying an important moderator for the effect. One core matter of debate has been whether individuals have a spontaneous tendency to cooperate and findings both in favor[3,4,6] and in conflict[2,7,8] with this hypothesis have been reported This inconsistent evidence indicates that important moderators that might lie in the situation, the person or their interaction have not been identified yet. Based on the findings concerning spontaneous cooperation and taking into account that SVO has been established as a strong predictor of cooperation[14,15], we expect main effects for SVO, decision time and–most importantly–their interaction on cooperation behavior
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