No 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.

In the original version of this article, there was one code error and some data errors that required updating of Figs. 2-6, Table 1 and the Supplementary Information file. The core conclusions are unaffected, but some numbers and statements have been updated.

Many researchers rely on meta-analysis to summarize research evidence. However, recent replication projects in the behavioral sciences suggest that effect sizes of original studies are overestimated, and this overestimation is typically attributed to publication bias and selective reporting of scientific results. As the validity of meta-analyses depends on the primary studies, there is a concern that systematic overestimation of effect sizes may translate into biased meta-analytic effect sizes. We compare the results of meta-analyses to large-scale pre-registered replications in psychology carried out at multiple labs. The multiple labs replications provide relatively precisely estimated effect sizes, which do not suffer from publication bias or selective reporting. Searching the literature, 17 meta-analyses – spanning more than 1,200 effect sizes and more than 370,000 participants - on the same topics as multiple labs replications are identified. We find that the meta-analytic effect sizes are significantly different from the replication effect sizes for 12 out of the 17 meta-replication pairs. These differences are systematic and on average meta-analytic effect sizes are about three times as large as the replication effect sizes.

The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. 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 29,087 participants in total. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most comprehensive data set to date. 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 substantial 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.