ORCID Profile
0000-0002-7182-8505
Current Organisation
University of Nottingham
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Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2016
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 23-08-2021
Abstract: Cooperation is key to well-functioning groups and societies. Rather than addressing high-cost cooperation involving giving money or time and effort, we examine social mindfulness—a form of interpersonal benevolence that requires basic perspective-taking and is aimed at leaving choice for others. Do societies differ in social mindfulness, and if so, does it matter? Here, we find not only considerable variation across 31 nations and regions but also an association between social mindfulness and countries’ performance on environmental protection. We conclude that something as small and concrete as interpersonal benevolence can be entwined with current and future issues of global importance.
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 25-02-2022
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Date: 19-01-2022
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2023
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 06-07-2021
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-021-93412-4
Abstract: Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity—a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation social dilemma understanding perceptions of social appropriateness beliefs about others’ cooperation and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Simon Gaechter.