Department of Management, Aarhus University, Fuglesangs Alle 4, 8210 Aarhus V, Denmark; Social Science Research Institute, Duke University, 334 Blackwell Street, Durham 27701, NC, USA.
Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, Aalborg University, Koghstræde 3, 9220 Aalborg Øst, Denmark.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2022 Aug;228:103664. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2022.103664. Epub 2022 Jul 7.
Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of reasoning. Nevertheless, the evidence on which system leads to what type of behavioral outcome, in terms of prosociality, is at best contradicting and perplexing. In the present paper, we examined the role of the two systems, operationalized as working memory depletion, in prosocial decision-making. We hypothesize that the nature of the available cognitive resources could affect whether humans engage in collaborative or exploitative social interaction. Using Operation Span to manipulate the availability of working memory, we examined how taxing the cognitive system affects cooperation and cheating. In two experiments, we provide evidence that concurrent load, but not cumulative load is detrimental to cooperation, whereas neither concurrent nor cumulative load seems to affect cheating behavior. These findings are in contrast to several previous assumptions. We discuss limitations, possible explanations, and future directions.
尽管人类的社交互动有时看起来毫不费力，但要成功进行合作或剥削性的社交互动，就需要有认知资源。双过程研究表明，两个系统，情感（非反思）和认知（反思），负责不同类型的推理。然而，关于哪个系统导致哪种行为结果（亲社会性）的证据最多是相互矛盾和令人困惑的。在本文中，我们研究了这两个系统（操作化为工作记忆损耗）在亲社会决策中的作用。我们假设，可用认知资源的性质可能会影响人类是否参与合作或剥削性的社交互动。我们使用操作广度来操纵工作记忆的可用性，研究了认知系统的负担如何影响合作和欺骗。在两个实验中，我们提供的证据表明，同时性负荷而不是累积性负荷不利于合作，而同时性和累积性负荷似乎都不会影响欺骗行为。这些发现与之前的一些假设相矛盾。我们讨论了局限性、可能的解释和未来的方向。
