Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA.
Nature. 2012 Sep 20;489(7416):427-30. doi: 10.1038/nature11467.
Cooperation is central to human social behaviour. However, choosing to cooperate requires individuals to incur a personal cost to benefit others. Here we explore the cognitive basis of cooperative decision-making in humans using a dual-process framework. We ask whether people are predisposed towards selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self-control; or whether they are intuitively cooperative, with reflection and prospective reasoning favouring 'rational' self-interest. To investigate this issue, we perform ten studies using economic games. We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions. Finally, an induction that primes subjects to trust their intuitions increases contributions compared with an induction that promotes greater reflection. To explain these results, we propose that cooperation is intuitive because cooperative heuristics are developed in daily life where cooperation is typically advantageous. We then validate predictions generated by this proposed mechanism. Our results provide convergent evidence that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.
合作是人类社会行为的核心。然而，选择合作需要个人付出个人成本来使他人受益。在这里，我们使用双过程框架探索人类合作决策的认知基础。我们想知道人们是否倾向于自私，只有通过积极的自我控制才能表现出合作；还是他们天生就具有合作性，反思和前瞻性推理更有利于“理性”的自身利益。为了研究这个问题，我们使用经济游戏进行了十项研究。我们发现，在一系列实验设计中，决策速度更快的受试者更具合作性。此外，迫使受试者快速做出决定会增加他们的贡献，而指示他们反思并迫使他们缓慢做出决定则会减少他们的贡献。最后，与促进更多反思的诱导相比，诱导受试者信任自己的直觉会增加他们的贡献。为了解释这些结果，我们提出合作是直观的，因为合作启发式在日常生活中得到发展，而在日常生活中，合作通常是有利的。然后，我们验证了这个提出的机制所产生的预测。我们的研究结果提供了一致的证据，表明直觉支持社会困境中的合作，而反思可能会破坏这些合作冲动。
