Essays on cognition and cooperation

In the last decade, scholars have studied cooperation in oneshot anonymous interactions under a dual-process perspective to understand whether it is more likely to be the result of decisions made relying on an intuitive process or whether it requires deliberation. The Social Heuristic Hypothesis predicts that, in one-shot anonymous interactions, cooperation is the result of an intuitive process. Although there is empirical evidence in favor of this hypothesis, many experiments failed to replicate such results. In this Dissertation, we try to reconcile the mixed evidence by exploring additional aspects of the causal link between the modes of cognition and cooperation, such as possible moderator factors, and by exploring the reliability of cognitive manipulations. In Chapter 1, we investigate the role of altruism and reciprocity in the online one-shot Public Goods Game, both with and without the cognitive manipulations. In Chapter 2, we explore the role of social norms and altruism in the online one-shot Public Goods Game under cognitive manipulations. In the last Chapter, we develop an experimental design to validate the treatments used to induce intuition and deliberation. As a proxy of the effectiveness of the cognitive manipulations, we use the Cognitive Reflection Test. This is a measure of the ability of individuals to resist intuitive responses and to engage in further reflection. In Chapter 1, we find that altruism goes with larger contribution levels under both treatments; reciprocity predicts contribution levels only under treatment designed to foster deliberation. In Chapter 2, we find that contributions and descriptive norms are higher whereas injunctive norms are more extreme under an experimental manipulation designed to foster deliberation. Finally, in the last Chapter, we find that the treatment designed to foster deliberation increases the likelihood to provide correct answers, while the treatment designed to foster intuition increases the likelihood to provide non-intuitive incorrect answers.