Social setting, intuition, and experience in lab experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dual process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive e↵ect on cooperation (duality) among people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience in economic games on cooperation (history-dependence). Here we report a large experiment exploring how these findings transfer to a non-cooperative setting. We find three major results: (i) promoting intuition versus deliberation has no e↵ect on cooperative behavior among inexperienced subjects living in a non-cooperative setting; (ii) experienced subjects are much more cooperative than inexperienced subjects; and (iii) experience has a U-shaped e↵ect on cooperation: subjects with little experience cooperate the least. We also find evidence that the behavioral transition between little experienced subjects and experienced subjects is primarily driven by intuitive responses. These results suggest that cooperation is a slow learning process, rather than an instinctive impulse or a self-controlled choice, and that experience operates primarily via the channel of intuition. In doing so, our findings shed further light on the cognitive basis of human cooperative decision-making and provide further support for the recently proposed Social Heuristics Hypothesis.