Social setting, intuition, and experience in lab experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making

TL;DR

This study investigates how social setting, intuition, and experience influence cooperative decision-making, revealing that experience enhances cooperation primarily through intuition, especially under time pressure, in non-cooperative environments.

Contribution

It demonstrates that cooperation is a learning process influenced by experience and intuition, extending the Social Heuristics Hypothesis to non-cooperative settings.

Findings

Experience increases cooperation under time pressure.

Intuition's role in cooperation depends on social setting and experience.

Cooperation develops through learning rather than innate impulse.

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience in economic games on cooperation (history-dependence). Here we report on a lab experiment exploring how these findings transfer to a non-cooperative setting. We find two major results: (i) promoting intuition versus deliberation has no effect on cooperative behavior among inexperienced subjects living in a non-cooperative setting; (ii) experienced subjects cooperate more than inexperienced subjects, but only under time pressure. These results suggest that cooperation is a learning process, rather than an instinctive impulse or a self-controlled choice, and that experience operates primarily via the channel of intuition. In doing so, our findings shed further light on the cognitive basis of human cooperative decision-making and provide further support for the recently proposed Social Heuristics Hypothesis.