The Intuitive Cooperation Hypothesis Revisited: A Meta-analytic Examination of Effect-size and Between-study Heterogeneity

Abstract

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.

Altruism, fast and slow? Evidence from a meta-analysis and a new experiment

“…1 The proliferation of studies using cognitive resources manipulations has triggered a number of recent meta-studies of these literatures. For example, Rand (2016), Kvarven et al (2019), and Rand (2019) assess the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation decisions. Verschuere et al (2018) study the role of cognitive load interventions on lying.…”

Future-Orientation (as Trait and State) Promotes Reputation-Protective Choice in Moral Dilemmas

“…People are disgusted and averse to even thinking about breaking taboos that could tarnish their reputation (Haidt et al, 1997;Tetlock, 2003). People may also develop intuitions about cooperation-to reciprocate by default (Rand, 2016; but see also, Capraro, 2019;Kvarven et al, 2019). Thus, people might protect their reputation by relying on heuristics or "mental rules of thumb" to behave morally as if someone is watching, even when people think they are not being observed (Jordan & Rand, 2019).…”

Crime-Related Exposure to Violence and Social Preferences: Experimental Evidence from Bogotá

“…Moreover, emotional reactions associated with both channels activate the amygdala (Ledoux, 2002), the region of the brain responsible for social cognition (Adolphs, 2010), and is more likely to make treated individuals prone to recognize trustworthy signals in the controlled environment or in their own community, thus favoring cooperation (Declerk and Boone, 2015). From a neuroeconomic point of view, it is also easier to explain heterogeneous results in an urban environment, where other cues are more salient, or where intuition provides less guidance (see the debate in Kvarven et al, 2019, Rand, 2019, Alós-Ferrer and Garagnani, 2018, Krajbich et al, 2015.…”

“…Our results are consistent with this explanation because no participants had previous experience with an experimental laboratory. Additionally, it is interesting to note that in the debate over the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, meta-reviews suggest that those manipulations based on emotions are the most effective (Kvarven et al, 2019, Rand, 2019, and both the recall and the shock induce emotions (Bogliacino et al, 2017;Delgado et al, 2006).…”