Dataset Information

Beliefs about others' intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice.

ABSTRACT: 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.

SUBMITTER: Castro Santa J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5951794 | biostudies-literature | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Beliefs about others' intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice.

Castro Santa Juana J Exadaktylos Filippos F Soto-Faraco Salvador S

Scientific reports 20180514 1

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 ...[more]

PMID: 29760504

Similar Datasets

Project description:Many studies suggest that preschoolers initially privilege outcome over intention in their moral judgments. The present findings reveal that, in contrast, even younger preschoolers can privilege intentions when evaluating characters who successfully or unsuccessfully help or hinder a third party in achieving its goal. Following a live-action puppet show originally created for infant populations, children made a forced-choice social judgment (which puppet was liked) and two forced-choice moral judgments (which puppet was nicer, which puppet should be punished), and were asked to explain their punishment allocations. In two experiments (N = 195), 3- and 4-year-olds evaluated characters with distinct intentions to help or to hinder who were associated with either positive or negative outcomes. Both ages judged characters with more positive intentions as nicer, and allocated punishment to characters with more negative intentions; neither of these tendencies depended on the outcomes the characters were associated with. Three-year-olds' responses were somewhat less consistent than were 4-year-olds', in that 3-year-olds' judgments were disrupted by ambiguous harmful intent. Notably, children's social judgments were less consistent than their moral judgments. In a third and final experiment (N = 100), children evaluated characters with the same intention but who were associated with different outcomes. Children showed inconsistent responding across age and outcome valence, but only 4-year-olds evaluating two characters with positive intentions reliably responded based on outcome. When providing informative responses in all three studies, children most frequently explained their punishment allocations by appealing to the puppet's (attempted) hindering action or failure to help. These findings raise questions as to what underlies different patterns of response across studies in the literature, and suggests that observing live interactions may facilitate young children's intention-based moral judgments.

Dataset Information

Beliefs about others' intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice.

Publications

Beliefs about others' intentions determine whether cooperation is the faster choice.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets