Affect and fairness: Dictator games under cognitive load

Scientific Reports, 2018

Is collaboration the fast choice for humans? Past studies proposed that cooperation is a behavioural default, based on Response Times (RT) findings. Here we contend that the individual's reckoning of the immediate social environment shapes her predisposition to cooperate and, hence, response latencies. In a social dilemma game, we manipulate the beliefs about the partner's intentions to cooperate and show that they act as a switch that determines cooperation and defection RTs; when the partner's intention to cooperate is perceived as high, cooperation choices are speeded up, while defection is slowed down. Importantly, this social context effect holds across varying expected payoffs, indicating that it modulates behaviour regardless of choices' similarity in monetary terms. Moreover, this pattern is moderated by individual variability in social preferences: Among conditional cooperators, high cooperation beliefs speed up cooperation responses and slow down defection. Among free-riders, defection is always faster and more likely than cooperation, while high cooperation beliefs slow down all decisions. These results shed new light on the conflict of choices account of response latencies, as well as on the intuitive cooperation hypothesis, and can help to correctly interpret and reconcile previous, apparently contradictory results, by considering the role of context in social dilemmas.

Economics Letters, 2021

We show that generosity is affected when we vary the level of role uncertainty, i.e., the probability that the dictator's decision will be implemented. We also show that framing matters for generosity in that subjects are less generous when they are told that their choices will be implemented with a certain probability, compared with a setting in which they are told that their choices will not be implemented with certain probability.

Social Neuroscience, 2016

Recent research suggests that prosocial outcomes in sharing games arise from prefrontal control of self-maximizing impulses. We used continuous Theta Burst Stimulation (cTBS) to disrupt the functioning of two prefrontal areas, the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC). We used cTBS in the right MT/V5, as a control area. We then tested subjects' prosocial inclinations with an unsupervised Dictator Game in which they allocated real money anonymously between themselves and low and high socioeconomic status (SES) players. cTBS over the two prefrontal sites made subjects more generous compared to MT/V5. More specifically, cTBS over DLPFC increased offers to high SES players, while cTBS over DMPFC caused increased offers to low SES players. These data, the first to demonstrate an effect of disruptive neuromodulation on costly sharing, suggest that DLPFC and MPFC exert inhibitory control over prosocial inclinations during costly sharing, though they may do so in different ways. DLPFC may implement contextual control, while DMPFC may implement a tonic form of control. This study demonstrates that humans' prepotent inclination is toward prosocial outcomes when cognitive control is reduced, even when prosocial decisions carry no strategic benefit and concerns for reputation are minimized.

Nature communications, 2015

Do people intuitively favour certain actions over others? In some dual-process research, reaction-time (RT) data have been used to infer that certain choices are intuitive. However, the use of behavioural or biological measures to infer mental function, popularly known as 'reverse inference', is problematic because it does not take into account other sources of variability in the data, such as discriminability of the choice options. Here we use two example data sets obtained from value-based choice experiments to demonstrate that, after controlling for discriminability (that is, strength-of-preference), there is no evidence that one type of choice is systematically faster than the other. Moreover, using specific variations of a prominent value-based choice experiment, we are able to predictably replicate, eliminate or reverse previously reported correlations between RT and selfishness. Thus, our findings shed crucial light on the use of RT in inferring mental processes and s...

Nature Communications, 2018

Social decision making involves balancing conflicts between selfishness and pro-sociality. The cognitive processes underlying such decisions are not well understood, with some arguing for a single comparison process, while others argue for dual processes (one intuitive and one deliberative). Here, we propose a way to reconcile these two opposing frameworks. We argue that behavior attributed to intuition can instead be seen as a starting point bias of a sequential sampling model (SSM) process, analogous to a prior in a Bayesian framework. Using mini-dictator games in which subjects make binary decisions about how to allocate money between themselves and another participant, we find that pro-social subjects become more pro-social under time pressure and less pro-social under time delay, while selfish subjects do the opposite. Our findings help reconcile the conflicting results concerning the cognitive processes of social decision making and highlight the importance of modeling the dyn...

Scientific Reports, 2021

The intergenerational sustainability dilemma (ISD) is a situation of whether or not a person sacrifices herself for future sustainability. To examine the individual behaviors, one-person ISD game (ISDG) is instituted with strategy method where a queue of individuals is organized as a generational sequence. In ISDG, each individual chooses unsustainable (or sustainable) option with her payoff of $$X$$ X ($$X-D$$ X - D ) and an irreversible cost of $$D$$ D (zero cost) to future generations in $$36$$ 36 situations. Future ahead and back (FAB) mechanism is suggested as resolution for ISD by taking the perspective of future generation whereby each individual is first asked to take the next generation’s standpoint and request what she wants the current generation to choose, and, second, to make the actual decision from the original position. Results show that individuals choose unsustainable option as previous generations do so or $$\frac{X}{D}$$ X D is low (i.e., sustainability is endang...

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2015

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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017

Behavioral and neuroscientific studies explore two pathways through which internalized social norms promote prosocial behavior. One pathway involves internal control of impulsive selfishness, and the other involves emotion-based prosocial preferences that are translated into behavior when they evade cognitive control for pursuing self-interest. We measured 443 participants' overall prosocial behavior in four economic games. Participants' predispositions [social value orientation (SVO)] were more strongly reflected in their overall game behavior when they made decisions quickly than when they spent a longer time. Prosocially (or selfishly) predisposed participants behaved less prosocially (or less selfishly) when they spent more time in decision making, such that their SVO prosociality yielded limited effects in actual behavior in their slow decisions. The increase (or decrease) in slower decision makers was prominent among consistent prosocials (or proselfs) whose strong pre...

Economic Inquiry, 2016

Giving in dictator games has been shown to vary with the nature of the endowment, the action space, and the recipient. This paper is the first to test if these three factors similarly affect warmglow giving alone. There is no reason that one would expect the same outcomes given that the motivations for warm-glow giving are different from the motivations for total (warm-glow plus purely altruistic) giving. We find that giving to charity (second participant) increases (decreases) when the endowment is earned. The option to take does reduce warm-glow giving to charity, but significant giving remains.

Theory and Decision

This paper provides evidence for the following novel insights: (1) People’s economic decisions depend on their psychological motives, which are shaped predictably by the social context. (2) In particular, the social context influences people’s other-regarding preferences, their beliefs and their perceptions. (3) The influence of the social context on psychological motives can be measured experimentally by priming two antagonistic motives—care and anger—in one player towards another by means of an observance or a violation of a fairness norm. Using a mediation approach, we find that the care motive leads to higher levels of cooperation which are driven by more optimistic beliefs, a different perception of the game as well as by a shift towards more pro-social preferences.

Scientific Reports, 2019

We present an incentivized laboratory experiment where a random sample of individuals playing a series of stag hunt games are forced to make their choices under time constraints, while the rest of the players have no time limits to decide. We find that individuals under the time pressure treatment are more likely to play stag (vs. hare) than individuals in the control group: under time constraints 62.85% of players are stag-hunters as opposed to 52.32% when no time limits are imposed. These results offer the first experimental evidence on the role of intuition and deliberation in strategic situations that entail social coordination. In interpreting our findings, we provide a discussion on ruling social conventions in daily-life interactions. The recent literature in judgment and decision-making has shown an upsurge of interest to understand prosociality from a dual process perspective 1. Dual process theories of decision-making 2 are well established in cognitive and social psychology. They suggest that humans make decisions under two modes of reasoning, namely intuition, fast and relying on heuristics, and deliberation, slow and based on careful scrutiny of costs and benefits 3-5. Following this insights, a number of recent contributions have run incetivized experiments to investigate the effects that the mode of reasoning has on prosocial behavior in a variety of games 6,7 , such as: prisoner dilemmas and public good games 8,9 , dictator games 9-11 , ultimatum games 12,13 , deception games 14 , and allocation decisions 15. In this paper we consider the stag hunt game, which can be interpreted as a social dilemma involving prosociality 16. In the basic game, the opposition between coordination on stag and coordination on hare can be seen as a parable for social situations in which coordination can be pursued on two different levels: coordinating on better rewarding, but necessarily collaborative actions, and coordinating on less rewarding actions, which do not require collaboration. Accordingly, coordinated play on either action can be interpreted as a social norm, i.e., a social convention 17,18. Even if the stag hunt game has been widely investigated with experimental methods 19,20 , to our knowledge, there is no previous attempt to empirically assess the effects that the tension between intuition and deliberation has on the choice between stag and hare. Some experimental evidence is available for pure coordination games 21 , suggesting that intuition leads to rely more on culturally focal options. In this work, we manipulate the mode of reasoning by imposing a 10-second time constraint on decision-making 6,22. While response times are related to the mode of reasoning in important respects 23 , the interpretation of results obtained under time pressure requires careful consideration 9,24. As already noted 25 , different theories of dual process cognition identify different attributes to, respectively, intuition and deliberation 5,26. A large body of this literature relates intuition to automatic and unconscious processes that occur extremely fast, possibly in less than a second 27 ; several contributions on the relationship between prosocial behavior and ego depletion 10,13,28-30 or cognitive load 12,31 take this perspective. Other contributions define intuition as a mode of reasoning that is not fully unconscious and automatic, but entails some reflection in the form of heuristics 32-34 ; in these studies, intuition is assumed to be substantially slower than in the previous approach. Different definitions of intuition can, at least in part, explain opposing results in the analysis of intuitive behavior and prosociality 1,35,36. Indeed, while some researchers contend that intuition induces cooperative behaviors while reflection stimulates selfishness 8,33,37,38 , others argue that deliberation and reflection act as a hurdle to selfish impulses and lead to prosociality and cooperation 13,39,40. Finally, some studies find no effect of the adoption of intuition on cooperation 41,42. The interpretation of intuition as a mode of reasoning well fits our experimental setting where a 10-second time constraint is used to inhibit reliance on deliberation. According to this interpretation, the distinction between intuition and deliberation recalls the distinction between instinctive and contemplative decision-making, implying that both processes involve conscious reasoning and require a minimum amount of time and reflection 43. In