Abstract
The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,315 participants in total. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a high degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation. Overall, we fail to obtain compelling evidence for the intuitive cooperation hypothesis.
Highlights
The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that intuitive decisions drive cooperative behavior and that reflective control overrides a cooperative ‘default’ behavior to produce selfish decisions (Bear and Rand 2016; Rand et al 2014)
We note that our results cannot be explained by between-study variation in participant compliance rates; we find no evidence that studies with higher compliance rates yield systematically higher effect sizes, speaking against the claim in Rand (2017a, 2019) that non-compliance explains why many studies find no effect of intuition manipulations on cooperation
The magnitude of the overall effect is only 35.7% of the main effect reported in a prior meta-analysis that excludes non-compliers (Rand 2016) and only 52.1% the size of the intention-to-treat effect reported in that metaanalysis
Summary
The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that intuitive decisions drive cooperative behavior and that reflective control overrides a cooperative ‘default’ behavior to produce selfish decisions (Bear and Rand 2016; Rand et al 2014). We identify a single source of variation in the effect size that may account for inconsistent conclusions in the literature; when we exclude the six experiments that feature this specific manipulation—comprising just 7% of our total data set—we obtain no effect of intuition on cooperation, and the exclusion yields a substantial reduction in systematic between-study variation. These results are problematic for the SHH as emotion-induction manipulations are vulnerable to alternative interpretations—and the SHH gives no reason for favoring this class of manipulations over others. We present our data set and methods, the analysis, after which we offer concluding remarks on the cognitive foundations of cooperation and the state of the literature
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