Both peer-to-peer punishments and rewards can be effective in increasing cooperation in dilemma situations. We follow Kamei’s experimental design [2014, Economics Letters 124, pp.199-202], except we use a reward option instead of a punishment one. Consistent with Kamei (2014), decisions to...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

In Rome, if you start digging, chances are you will nd things. We consider a famous complaint that justies the underdeveloped Roman metro system: \if we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological nds that are too valuable to destroy, so we would have wasted...

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,...

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What...

Recent work using decontextualized economic games suggests that cooperation is a dynamic decision-making process: automatic responses typically support cooperation on average, while deliberation leads to increased selfishness. Here we performed two studies examining how these temporal effects...

Are humans intuitively altruistic, or does altruism require self-control? A theory of social heuristics, whereby intuitive responses favor typically successful behaviors, suggests that the answer may depend on who you are. In particular, evidence suggests that women are expected to behave...

Two separate bodies of work have examined whether culture affects cooperation in economic games and whether cooperative or non-cooperative decisions occur more quickly. Here, we connect this work by exploring the relationship between decision time and cooperation in American versus Indian...

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience...