The collective benefits of feeling good and letting go: positive emotion and (dis)inhibition interact to predict cooperative behavior.

David G Rand,Gordon Kraft-Todd,June Gruber,Matjaz Perc

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117426

David G Rand, Gordon Kraft-Todd + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0117426

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Journal: PloS one	Publication Date: Jan 27, 2015
Citations: 118	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Yale University, University of Colorado Boulder

Abstract

Cooperation is central to human existence, forming the bedrock of everyday social relationships and larger societal structures. Thus, understanding the psychological underpinnings of cooperation is of both scientific and practical importance. Recent work using a dual-process framework suggests that intuitive processing can promote cooperation while deliberative processing can undermine it. Here we add to this line of research by more specifically identifying deliberative and intuitive processes that affect cooperation. To do so, we applied automated text analysis using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to investigate the association between behavior in one-shot anonymous economic cooperation games and the presence inhibition (a deliberative process) and positive emotion (an intuitive process) in free-response narratives written after (Study 1, N = 4,218) or during (Study 2, N = 236) the decision-making process. Consistent with previous results, across both studies inhibition predicted reduced cooperation while positive emotion predicted increased cooperation (even when controlling for negative emotion). Importantly, there was a significant interaction between positive emotion and inhibition, such that the most cooperative individuals had high positive emotion and low inhibition. This suggests that inhibition (i.e., reflective or deliberative processing) may undermine cooperative behavior by suppressing the prosocial effects of positive emotion.

Highlights

Cooperation plays an integral role in our lives, sustaining friendships and business relationships and laying the foundation for successful organizations and nations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18]
Of particular relevance for the current work, we derived the presence of words in three theoretically relevant Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) categories; we focused on word frequencies related to positive emotion (“positive emotions” category, including words such as “love,” “nice,” and “sweet”), reflective processing (“inhibition” category, including words such as “block,” “constrain,” and “stop”), as well as negative emotion (“negative emotions” category, including words such as “hurt,” “ugly,” and “nasty”) as a control
In Study 2, we further investigated the role positive emotion and inhibition play in cooperation using stream-of-consciousness narratives written during a one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG), rather than afterwards, as participants’ post-decision recollections of their decision-making process may be biased

Summary

Introduction

Cooperation plays an integral role in our lives, sustaining friendships and business relationships and laying the foundation for successful organizations and nations [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18] When people cooperate, they can achieve more than each could working alone: cooperation creates benefit, and is positively non-zero sum. It is critical to identify potential processes that may influence cooperative behavior

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