Pro-sociality and strategic reasoning in economic decisions

Arruñada, Benito; Casari, Marco; Pancotto, Francesca

doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2015.00140

Cited by 9 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…In line with this prediction, little consistent association has been found between an individual's cognitive style and their overall willingness to cooperate in one-shot games (4,43,44). Furthermore, individual differences in reaction times, which are often interpreted as a proxy for intuitiveness (although see refs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation

Bear

Rand

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

283

239

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Humans often cooperate with strangers, despite the costs involved. A long tradition of theoretical modeling has sought ultimate evolutionary explanations for this seemingly altruistic behavior. More recently, an entirely separate body of experimental work has begun to investigate cooperation's proximate cognitive underpinnings using a dualprocess framework: Is deliberative self-control necessary to reign in selfish impulses, or does self-interested deliberation restrain an intuitive desire to cooperate? Integrating these ultimate and proximate approaches, we introduce dual-process cognition into a formal gametheoretic model of the evolution of cooperation. Agents play prisoner's dilemma games, some of which are one-shot and others of which involve reciprocity. They can either respond by using a generalized intuition, which is not sensitive to whether the game is oneshot or reciprocal, or pay a (stochastically varying) cost to deliberate and tailor their strategy to the type of game they are facing. We find that, depending on the level of reciprocity and assortment, selection favors one of two strategies: intuitive defectors who never deliberate, or dual-process agents who intuitively cooperate but sometimes use deliberation to defect in one-shot games. Critically, selection never favors agents who use deliberation to override selfish impulses: Deliberation only serves to undermine cooperation with strangers. Thus, by introducing a formal theoretical framework for exploring cooperation through a dual-process lens, we provide a clear answer regarding the role of deliberation in cooperation based on evolutionary modeling, help to organize a growing body of sometimesconflicting empirical results, and shed light on the nature of human cognition and social decision making.dual process | cooperation | evolutionary game theory | prisoner's dilemma | heuristics C ooperation, where people pay costs to benefit others, is a defining feature of human social interaction. However, our willingness to cooperate is puzzling because of the individual costs that cooperation entails. Explaining how the "selfish" process of evolution could have given rise to seemingly altruistic cooperation has been a major focus of research across the natural and social sciences for decades. Using the tools of evolutionary game theory, great progress has been made in identifying mechanisms by which selection can favor cooperative strategies, providing ultimate explanations for the widespread cooperation observed in human societies (1).In recent years, the proximate cognitive mechanisms underpinning human cooperation have also begun to receive widespread attention. For example, a wide range of experimental evidence suggests that emotion and intuition play a key role in motivating cooperation (2-5). The dual-process perspective on decision making (6-8) offers a powerful framework for integrating these observations. In the dual-process framework, decisions are conceptualized as arising from competition between two types of cognitive processes: (i) auto...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation

Bear

Rand

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

283

239

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“…Benjamin et al ( 2013 ) manipulates also the cognitive resources for evaluating choices to investigate the effect on risk aversion and discounting. Strategic thinking and the degree of bounded rationality (as measured by the subject's performance in a guessing game) is related to behavior in the dictator game in Arruñada et al ( 2015 ) and Dittrich and Leipold ( 2014 ).…”

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confidence: 99%

Social preferences and cognitive reflection: evidence from a dictator game experiment

Ponti

Rodríguez-Lara

2015

Front. Behav. Neurosci.

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This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between social preferences and cognitive abilities, which we measure using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). We elicit social preferences by way of 24 dictatorial situations, in which the Dictator's choice sets include (i) standard Dictator games, where increasing the Dictator's payoff yields a loss for the Recipient, (ii) efficient Dictator games, where increasing the Dictator's payoff also increases that the Recipient's; as well as other situations in which (iii) either the Dictator's or (iv) the Recipient's monetary payoff is held constant. We partition our subject pool into three groups: reflective (scoring 2 or more in the CRT), impulsive (opting twice or more for the “intuitive” but wrong answers in the CRT) and the remainder. We find that impulsive Dictators show a marked inequity aversion attitude, especially in standard Dictator Games. By contrast, reflective Dictators show lower distributional concerns, except for the situations in which the Dictators' payoff is held constant. In this case, reflective Dictators give significantly more.

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“…Written accounts constitute a significant improvement in the understanding of the role of the guessing game as a measure of strategic reasoning because they allow to remove spurious choices coming from subjects who admitted having responded at random and at the same time providing a guess belonging to the range of strategic guesses. It can also explain the lack of a significant relationship between strategic reasoning and pro sociality found in previous contributions studying the relationship between strategic reasoning and pro sociality 44 . While written accounts are not incentivized and may also be in principle prone to false answers, there are no incentives for a participant to falsely declare to have guessed an answer.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 79%

“…There is however a literature assessing the dyadic relationship between pairs of these three components with mixed results. Some studies analyze the connection between strategic behavior and pro sociality, without controlling for intuitive versus reflective behavior, and find a positive relation between strategic behavior and selfishness 42 , 43 or no significant relationship 44 . In turn, without controlling for strategic reasoning, there are several studies that—in line with our approach—use CRT as a tool to classify participants and to assess the relationship between their ability to engage in cognitive reflection and pro sociality.…”

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confidence: 99%

Reflectivity relates differently to pro sociality in naïve and strategic subjects

Pancotto

Righi

2021

Sci Rep

Self Cite

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Is pro sociality a natural impulse or the result of a self-controlled behavior? We investigate this issue in a lab in the field experiment with participants from the general adult population in Italy. We find two key results: first, that there is a positive relationship between pro sociality and strategic reasoning. Second, that reflectivity relates to lower pro sociality but only among strategic subjects, indicating that the intuitive view of pro sociality is valid only among strategic individuals. Non-strategic individuals are instead intuitively selfish. We surmise that these results emerge due to a common cognitive root between strategizing and pro sociality, namely empathy.

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Pro-sociality and strategic reasoning in economic decisions

Cited by 9 publications

References 36 publications

Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation

Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation

Social preferences and cognitive reflection: evidence from a dictator game experiment

Reflectivity relates differently to pro sociality in naïve and strategic subjects

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