title: Social setting, intuition and experience in laboratory experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making.
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.
authors.affiliation: Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI), Amsterdam 1098 XG, The Netherlands v.capraro@cwi.nl.
authors.forename: Valerio
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0579-0166
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Capraro
authors.affiliation: Department of Political Sciences, LUISS Guido Carli, Roma 00197, Italy.
authors.forename: Giorgia
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Cococcioni
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D003657:Decision Making; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007194:India; D019545:Intuition; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D000068956:Prisoner Dilemma; D011897:Random Allocation; D012931:Social Environment; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: cooperation; dual process; learning