Deliberation erodes cooperative behavior – even towards competitive out-groups, even when using a control condition, and even when eliminating selection bias

By many accounts cooperation appears to be a default strategy in social interaction. There are, however, several documented instances in which reflexive responding favors aggressive behaviors: for example, interactions with out-group members. We conduct a rigorous test of potential boundary conditions of intuitive prosociality by looking at whether intuition favors cooperation even towards competitive out-group members, and even in losses frames. Moreover, we address three major methodological limitations of previous research in this area: a lack of an unconstrained control condition; non-compliance with time manipulations leading to high rates of exclusions and thus a selection bias; and non-comprehension of the structure of the game. Even after eliminating participant selection bias and non-comprehension, we find that deliberation decreases cooperation: even in competitive contexts towards out-groups and even in a losses frame, though the differences in cooperation between groups was consistent across conditions. People may be intuitive cooperators, but they are not intuitively impartial.

众多观点认为，合作似乎已成为社会互动中的默认策略。然而，文献中记载了诸多实例，其中反射性反应偏好攻击性行为，例如与群体外成员的互动。本研究通过对直觉式利他主义的潜在边界条件进行严格测试，考察直觉是否倾向于与竞争性的群体外成员进行合作，以及在损失框架下是否仍偏好合作。此外，我们还针对该领域先前研究的三项主要方法论局限进行了探讨：缺乏不受约束的控制条件；时间操控的非遵守导致排除率较高，进而产生选择偏差；以及对游戏结构的误解。即便在消除参与者选择偏差和误解之后，我们发现深思熟虑会降低合作行为：即使在针对群体外的竞争环境中，以及在损失框架下，尽管不同条件下的群体间合作差异保持一致。人们可能是直觉上的合作者，但并非天生具有直觉上的不偏不倚。