The intuitive cooperation hypothesis revisited: a meta-analytic examination of effect size and between-study heterogeneity

Amanda Kvarven, Eirik Strømland, Conny Wollbrant, David Andersson, Magnus Johannesson, Gustav Tinghög, Daniel Västfjäll and Kristian Ove R. Myrseth ()
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Amanda Kvarven: University of Bergen
Eirik Strømland: University of Bergen
Conny Wollbrant: University of Stirling
David Andersson: Linköping University
Daniel Västfjäll: Linköping University
Kristian Ove R. Myrseth: University of York

Journal of the Economic Science Association, 2020, vol. 6, issue 1, No 3, 26-42

Abstract: Abstract The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,315 participants in total. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a high degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation. Overall, we fail to obtain compelling evidence for the intuitive cooperation hypothesis.

Keywords: Cooperation; Dual-process; Intuition; Time pressure; Cognitive load (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: The Intuitive Cooperation Hypothesis Revisited: A Meta-analytic Examination of Effect-size and Between-study Heterogeneity (2019)
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DOI: 10.1007/s40881-020-00084-3

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