The Cognitive Basis of Social Behavior: Cognitive Reflection Overrides Antisocial But Not Always Prosocial Motives

Even though human social behavior has received considerable scientific attention in the last decades, its cognitive underpinnings are still poorly understood. Applying a dual-process framework to the study of social preferences, we show in two studies that individuals with a more reflective/deliberative cognitive style, as measured by scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), are more likely to make choices consistent with “mild” altruism in simple non-strategic decisions. 

Such choices increase social welfare by increasing the other person's payoff at very low or no cost for the individual. The choices of less reflective individuals (i.e., those who rely more heavily on intuition), on the other hand, are more likely to be associated with either egalitarian or spiteful motives. 

We also identify a negative link between reflection and choices characterized by “strong” altruism, but this result holds only in Study 2. Moreover, we provide evidence that the relationship between social preferences and CRT scores is not driven by general intelligence. 

We discuss how our results can reconcile some previous conflicting findings on the cognitive basis of social behavior...

In two studies, we showed that those individuals with a more reflective cognitive style (i.e., those who are less likely to rely on intuitive, System 1 processes) are more likely to make choices consistent with mildly altruistic motives in simple monetary decisions free of strategic and reciprocal concerns. These results suggest that behaviors that increase social welfare by increasing others' payoffs at a very low or no cost for the individual may be the result of conscious deliberation rather than automatic heuristics. Behaviors driven by egalitarian or spiteful concerns, however, appear to be more intimately associated with intuition⁶.

While the above findings are robust across the two studies, we also find a slight but remarkable difference with respect to strongly altruistic choices that increase the other's payoff at a relatively high cost to the individual. In Study 1 reflective subjects were quite likely to make such choices whereas in Study 2 they were not. This may be partly explained by differences in stakes across studies, although our estimation procedure relies on the assumption that utility is linear over the relevant range of payoffs (as in Fehr and Schmidt, 1999) in which case stakes would not affect social preferences decisions. Methodological differences across studies (in Study 2 weak altruism was divided into four subcategories and strong altruism into two subcategories) may also have facilitated the observation of this divergence. In addition, this difference might also be accounted for by either students' educational backgrounds (majors) or cultural differences (Study 1 was conducted in the US while Study 2 was conducted in Spain). Interestingly, no differences in giving behavior between US and Spain student subjects were documented in the baseline experiments conducted by Rey-Biel et al. (2015) suggesting that cultural differences in giving may not play a major role in our findings⁷. Finally, this difference could also be explained by the existence of ceiling effects as the average level of cognitive reflection, as measured by the number of correct answers to the CRT, was higher (25% higher, two-sided t-test: p < 0.01) in Study 1. Exploring these possibilities is an interesting avenue for future research...

Full article at:   http://goo.gl/vzJshi

By:  Brice Corgnet,1,* Antonio M. Espín,2,3 and Roberto Hernán-González3,4

¹Argyros School of Business and Economics, Economic Science Institute, Chapman University, Orange, CA, USA

²Economics Department, Middlesex University Business School, London, UK

³Granada Lab of Behavioral Economics, Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain

⁴Business School, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Edited by: Agnes Gruart, University Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain

Reviewed by: Tobias Kalenscher, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany; Matteo Migheli, University of Torino, Italy

*Correspondence: Brice Corgnet ; Email: ude.nampahc@tengroc

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