Depletion influences restraint, but does it influence conflict identification? Expanding on Osgood and Muraven (2015)

Osgood and Muraven (2015) show that cognitive depletion reduces pro-social behaviors, but not pro-social attitudes. We expand on the authors’ interpretation by relating their results to recent theorizing on the relationship between pro-social behavior and self-control. This framework distinguishes between the proclivity to identify self-control conflict and the capacity to exercise restraint. Osgood and Muraven’s (2015) findings can be interpreted as evidence that cognitive depletion in social contexts fails to influence a necessary condition for identifying self-control conflict. However, the results do not yet allow us to conclude that depletion influences capacity to exercise restraint. Further work is needed to understand the mechanisms by which cognitive depletion influences pro-social behavior.PostprintPeer reviewe

Social dilemmas : When self-control benefits cooperation

Date of Acceptance: 21/09/2014Individuals in a social dilemma may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and better judgment to cooperate. Pairing a public goods game with a subtle framing technique, we test whether perception of self-control conflict strengthens the association between self-control and cooperation. Consistent with our hypothesis, cooperative behavior is positively associated with self-control in the treatment that raised the relative likelihood of perceiving conflict, but not associated with self-control in the treatment that lowered the likelihood. Our results indicate that self-control benefits cooperation.PostprintPeer reviewe

Strong, Bold, and Kind: Self-Control and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas

We develop a model relating self-control, risk preferences and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. We subject our model to data from an experimental public goods game and a risk experiment, and we measure conflict identification and self-control. As predicted, we find a robust association between self-control and higher levels of cooperation, and the association is weaker for more risk-averse individuals. Free riders differ from other contributor types only in their tendency not to have identified a self-control conflict in the first place. Our model accounts for the data at least as well as do other models

Models inconsistent with altruism cannot explain the evolution of human cooperation

PostprintPeer reviewe

Gender and cooperative preferences on five continents

Evidence of gender differences in cooperation in social dilemmas is inconclusive. This paper experimentally elicits unconditional contributions, a contribution vector (cooperative preferences), and beliefs about the level of others’ contributions in variants of the public goods game. We show that existing inconclusive results can be understood and completely explained when controlling for beliefs and underlying cooperative preferences. Robustness checks based on data from around 450 additional independent observations around the world confirm our main empirical results: Women are significantly more often classified as conditionally cooperative than men, while men are more likely to be free riders. Beliefs play an important role in shaping unconditional contributions, and they seem to be more malleable or sensitive to subtle cues for women than for men

Investigations of decision processes at the intersection of psychology and economics

In recent years, there has been growing interest in capturing, manipulating, and analyzing the effects of decision-making processes that underlie economic choice. This editorial discusses these recent developments by contextualizing the six contributions to the special issue “Cognition and Economic Behavior” within the broader scope of the existing literature

Gender and cooperative preferences on five continents

Evidence of gender differences in cooperation in social dilemmas is inconclusive. This paper experimentally elicits unconditional contributions, a contribution vector (cooperative preferences), and beliefs about the level of others’ contributions in variants of the public goods game. We show that existing inconclusive results can be understood and completely explained when controlling for beliefs and underlying cooperative preferences. Robustness checks based on data from around 450 additional independent observations around the world confirm our main empirical results: Women are significantly more often classified as conditionally cooperative than men, while men are more likely to be free riders. Beliefs play an important role in shaping unconditional contributions, and they seem to be more malleable or sensitive to subtle cues for women than for men

Gender differences in altruism: Evidence from a natural field experiment on matched donations

This paper reports new findings on gender differences in altruism. Conducting a natural field experiment (N 2,164) we study donation behavior in a naturally occurring environment using a matched donation design. Contrary to previous research, we find that reducing the "price of altruism" by increasing matching efficiency has a significantly stronger effect on females than on males

The Intuitive Cooperation Hypothesis Revisited: A Meta-analytic Examination of Effect Size and Between-study Heterogeneity

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

Gender and cooperative preferences

Evidence of gender differences in cooperation in social dilemmas is inconclusive. This paper experimentally elicits unconditional contributions, a contribution vector (cooperative preferences), and beliefs about the level of others’ contributions in variants of the public goods game. We show that existing inconclusive results can be understood when controlling for beliefs and underlying cooperative preferences. Robustness checks of our original data from Germany, based on data from six countries around the world, confirm our main empirical results: Women are significantly more often classified as conditionally cooperative than men, while men are more likely to be free riders. Beliefs play an important role in shaping unconditional contributions, supporting the view that these are more malleable or sensitive to subtle cues in women than in men