D. G. Rand, J. D. Greene
& M. A. Nowak
Nature 489, pp 427-430 –
doi:10.1038/nature11467
Abstract
Cooperation is central to
human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to
incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of
cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask
whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only
through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with
reflection and prospective reasoning favouring ‘rational’ self-interest. To
investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find
that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions
more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide
quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and
forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction
that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared
with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results,
we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are
developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then
validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide
convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and
that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
Here is a portion of a
review of this article:
The researchers wanted to
know whether people's first impulse is cooperative or selfish. To find out,
they started by looking at how quickly different people made their choices, and
found that faster deciders were more likely to contribute to the common good.
Next they forced people to go fast or to stop and think, and found the same thing: Faster deciders tended to be more cooperative, and the people who had to stop and think gave less.
Finally, the researchers tested their hypothesis by manipulating people's mindsets. They asked some people to think about the benefits of intuition before choosing how much to contribute. Others were asked to think about the virtues of careful reasoning. Once again, intuition promoted cooperation, and deliberation did the opposite.
While some might interpret the results as suggesting that cooperation is "innate" or "hard-wired," if anything they highlight the role of experience. People who had better opinions of those around them in everyday life showed more cooperative impulses in these experiments, and previous experience with these kinds of studies eroded those impulses.
