Social setting,intuition and experience in laboratory experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making |
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Authors: | Valerio Capraro Giorgia Cococcioni |
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Affiliation: | 1.Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam 1098 XG, The Netherlands;2.Department of Political Sciences, LUISS Guido Carli, Roma 00197, Italy |
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Abstract: | Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation typically has 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 laboratory 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 behaviour 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. 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. |
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Keywords: | cooperation dual process learning |
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