The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality: A Review

Abstract

Which social decisions are intuitive? Which are deliberative? The dual-process approach to human sociality has emerged in the last decades as a vibrant and exciting area of research. Here, I review the existing literature on the cognitive basis of cooperation, altruism, honesty, positive and negative reciprocity, and (act) utilitarianism. I conclude by introducing a game-theoretical framework that organizes the majority of the empirical regularities. This framework extends Rand and colleagues’ Social Heuristics Hypothesis to any one-shot game G. The core assumption of this “General Social Heuristics Hypothesis” is that, under intuition, people play a Nash equilibrium of the “real analogue of G”, Greal , while under deliberation people play a Nash equilibrium of G. Greal differs from G along two dimensions: G is one-shot, while Greal might be iterated; the payoffs of Greal might be different from the payoffs of G, although they are ordered in (almost) the same way.