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The intuitive cooperation hypothesis revisited: a meta-analytic examination of effect size and between-study heterogeneity

2020; Springer Science+Business Media; Volume: 6; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/s40881-020-00084-3

2199-6776

Amanda Kvarven, Eirik Strømland, Conny Wollbrant, David Andersson, Magnus Johannesson, Gustav Tinghög, Daniel Västfjäll, Kristian Ove R. Myrseth,

Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior

Abstract The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. Although key results in this literature have failed to replicate in pre-registered studies, recent meta-analyses report an overall effect of intuition on cooperation. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,315 participants in total. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a high degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation. Overall, we fail to obtain compelling evidence for the intuitive cooperation hypothesis.