It is standard in experimental economics to use decontextualized designs where payoff structures are presented using neutral language. Here we show that cooperation in such a neutrally framed Prisoner’s Dilemma is equivalent to a PD framed as contributing to a cooperative endeavour....

Trust is a central component of social and economic interactions among humans. While rational self-interest dictates that “investors” should not be trusting and “trustees” should not be trustworthy in one-shot anonymous interactions, behavioral experiments with the “trust game” have...

We explore the extent to which altruism, as measured by giving in a dictator game (DG), accounts for play in a noisy version of the repeated prisoner's dilemma. We find that DG giving is correlated with cooperation in the repeated game when no cooperative equilibria exist, but not when...

It has been argued that punishment promotes the evolution of cooperation when mutation rates are high (i.e. when agents engage in ‘exploration dynamics’). Mutations maintain a steady supply of agents that punish free-riders, and thus free-riders are at a disadvantage. Recent experiments,...

Cooperation is central to human societies. Yet relatively little is known about the cognitive underpinnings of cooperative decision-making. Does cooperation require deliberate self-restraint? Or is spontaneous prosociality reined in by calculating self-interest? Here we present a theory of why...

We review two fundamentally different ways that decision time is related to cooperation. First, studies have experimentally manipulated decision time to understand how cooperation is related to the use of intuition versus deliberation. Current evidence supports the claim that time pressure (and,...

What explains variability in norms of cooperation across organizations and cultures? One answer comes from the internalization of norms prescribing behavior that is typically successful under the institutions that govern one's daily life. These norms are then carried over into atypical...

How does cognitive sophistication impact cooperation? We explore this question using a model of the co-evolution of cooperation and cognition. In our model, agents confront social dilemmas and coordination games, and make decisions using intuition or deliberation. Intuition is automatic and...

Does intuition favor prosociality, or does prosocial behavior require deliberative self-control? The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) stipulates that intuition favors typically advantageous behavior – but which behavior is typically advantageous depends on both the individual and the...

What makes people willing to pay costs to benefit others? Does such cooperation require effortful self-control, or do automatic, intuitive processes favor cooperation? Time pressure has been shown to increase cooperative behavior in Public Goods Games, implying a predisposition towards...