A general evolutionary framework for the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation

Stephan Jagau and Matthijs van Veelen
Additional contact information
Stephan Jagau: CREED, University of Amsterdam

Nature Human Behaviour, 2017, vol. 1, issue 8, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract In the experimental and theoretical literature on social heuristics, the case has been made for dual-process cooperation. Empirical evidence is thought to be consistent with the idea that people tend to be nice before thinking twice. A recent theoretical paper moreover suggests that this is also the type of dual process one would expect from evolution. In ‘Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation’ by Bear and Rand1, natural selection never favours agents who use deliberation to override the impulse to defect, while deliberation can be favoured if it serves to undermine cooperation in interactions without future repercussions. Here we show that this conclusion depends on a seemingly innocuous assumption about the distribution of the costs of deliberation, and that with different distributions, dual-process defectors can also evolve. Dual-process defectors intuitively defect, but use deliberation to switch to cooperation when it is in their self-interest to do so (that is, when future repercussions exist). The more general model also shows that there is a variety of strategies that combine intuition and deliberation with Bayesian learning and strategic ignorance. Our results thereby unify and generalize findings from different, seemingly unrelated parts of the literature.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0152 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:1:y:2017:i:8:d:10.1038_s41562-017-0152

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0152

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().