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The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality 1 Running head: THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 1 The dual-process approach to human sociality: A review Valerio Capraro1 Middlesex University London Correspondence: [email protected] THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 2 Abstract Which social decisions are intuitive? Which are deliberative? The dual-process approach to human sociality has emerged in the last decades as a vibrant and exciting area of research. Here, I review the existing literature on the cognitive basis of cooperation, altruism, honesty, positive and negative reciprocity, and (act) utilitarianism. I conclude by introducing a game-theoretical framework that organizes the majority of the empirical regularities. This framework extends Rand and colleagues’ Social Heuristics Hypothesis to any one-shot game G. The core assumption of this “General Social Heuristics Hypothesis” is that, under intuition, people play a Nash equilibrium of the “real analogue of G”, Greal, while under deliberation people play a Nash equilibrium of G. Greal differs from G along two dimensions: G is one-shot, while Greal might be iterated; the payoffs of Greal might be different from the payoffs of G, although they are ordered in (almost) the same way. Keywords: dual-process, pro-sociality, cooperation, altruism, honesty, reciprocity, moral judgments. THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 3 The dual-process approach to human sociality: A review We, humans, are unique in the animal kingdom for our capacity to live in large societies made of thousands, if not millions, of unrelated individuals. Bees, ants, and the mole naked rat, for example, live in large societies, but individuals in the same society tend to share a substantial degree of biological relatedness. Other non-human primates live in groups of unrelated individuals, but these groups tend to be rather small. We are the only animals that are able to organize themselves in large societies, to the point that several scholars have argued that this uniquely-human capacity has been crucial for our evolutionary success as an animal species (Boyd & Richerson, 2005; Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003; Hill, 2002; Kaplan, Hill, Lancaster & Hurtado, 2000; Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne & Moll, 2005). One obvious consequence of living in large societies is that most of our decisions have consequences beyond our own: they affect other people or the society as a whole. Since the well-being of our societies highly depend on these social decisions, understanding how people make this type of decisions is a topic of great interest, that has attracted the attention of social scientists for decades. In the last twenty years, in particular, there has been a proliferation of studies viewing at human sociality through a dual-process lens. Dual-process theories contend that people’s choices result from the interplay between two cognitive systems, one that is fast and intuitive, and one that is slow and deliberative. By applying this dual process lens to human sociality, scholars have started investigating questions such as: Which social choices are intuitive? Which are deliberative? These questions turned out to be extremely fruitful and led to a series of exciting empirical results. These experimental findings have been paralleled by the development of theoretical frameworks. At the same time, however, a number of important problems remain unsolved, making this among the most thrilling and fascinating fields of research across behavioural THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 4 sciences. I thus believe that the time is mature to present a review of the state of the art. The goal of this survey is fourfold. First, I would like to introduce new researchers to a field that is growing exponentially and offers a number of open questions. Having this in mind, I will try to keep this review self-contained. Second, I would like to conduct an exhaustive literature review, which I believe can be helpful for scholars that are already in the field. Third, I would like to present a novel theoretical framework to organize the empirical evidence. This framework is inspired to the “Social Heuristics Hypothesis”, that has been proposed by Rand et al. (2014) to explain their result that intuition promotes cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas. Here, I make their descriptive theory mathematically formal, which allows me to extend it to every one-shot game. I show that this “General Social Heuristics Hypothesis” organizes the majority of the empirical results, although it does have some limitations. Fourth, I would like to describe a number of open problems that I think are fundamental to further advance our understanding of the cognitive basis of human sociality. Preliminaries Social decisions I start by defining the type of decisions that are the focus of this review: social decisions. Broadly speaking, one might define social whatever decision affects people other than the decision maker. Clearly, this is a very general class of decisions and it is unlikely that, without further specifications, one could draw general conclusions regarding the cognitive foundations of all social decisions. In fact, social decisions can differ from one another along several dimensions. One important dimension regards the consequences they bring about. What kind of consequences do these decisions have on other people? Good consequences or bad consequences? Right consequences or wrong consequences? Another important dimension along THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 5 which social decisions may differ is whether those people affected by the decisions have, in turn, the possibility to affect the decision maker. If so, does this happen after, simultaneously, or before knowing the decision maker’s choice? For these reasons, it is useful to restrict the attention to particular subclasses of social decisions. Previous research has mainly focused on cooperation, altruism, honesty, positive and negative reciprocity, and (act) utilitarianism. Following this work, I will also focus primarily on these types of social decisions. Exploring the cognitive basis of other types of decisions is certainly an important direction for future work. I will come back to this in the final section, where I will discuss the few studies that have investigated the cognitive basis of equity- efficiency, ingroup favouritism, and aggression. In what follows, I list only the types of decisions that are the primary focus of this review. (I selected these decisions because, for each of them, there have been at least ten experiments exploring their cognitive basis. I refer the reader to the final section for a short review of the other social decisions.) For each of these decision types, I give a short definition. More details about the way these decisions are measured are postponed to the corresponding sections. Cooperation Two or more decision-makers have to simultaneously decide whether to pay a cost to increase the payoff of their group. Altruism A decision-maker has to decide whether to pay a cost to increase the payoff of another person or group of people. THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 6 Honesty A decision-maker has to decide whether to lie or to tell the truth. The decision-maker’s and another person’s payoffs depend on whether the decision-maker lies or tells the truth. The other person might be abstract (i.e., the experimenter) or concrete (i.e., another participant). Furthermore, the consequences of the lie could be positive or negative, for either or both the decision-maker and the other person. Reciprocity After observing (or being the recipient of) an action, a decision-maker has to decide whether to pay a cost to punish or to reward the actor. Several types of reciprocity exist, depending on the details of the context. “Direct reciprocity” usually refers to situations in which the decision-maker was the recipient of the action (Trivers, 1971); “indirect reciprocity” usually refers to situations in which the decision-maker only observed the action, without being affected by it (Nowak & Sigmund, 2005). Additionally, one can distinguish between “positive reciprocity” and “negative reciprocity”, depending on whether the decision-maker has observed (or was the recipient of) a good or a bad action. Deontology vs. act utilitarianism A person has to decide whether to act so as to maximize the greater good, or to follow certain rules and norms, even if these lead to suboptimal outcomes. The dual-process approach Dual process theories refer to a set of frameworks sharing the core idea that people’s choices result from the interplay between two cognitive systems, one that is fast and intuitive, and one that is slow and deliberative. THE DUAL-PROCESS APPROACH TO HUMAN SOCIALITY 7 This idea has been formalized in several different ways (Fodor, 1983, 2001; Scheider & Schiffrin, 1977; Epstein, 1994; Epstein & Pacini, 1999; Chaiken, 1980; Chen & Chaiken, 1999; Reber, 1993; Evans & Over, 1996; Evans, 1989, 2006; Sloman, 1996; Smith & DeCoster, 2000; Hammond, 1996; Stanovich, 1999, 2004; Nisbett et al, 2001; Wilson, 2002; Lieberman, 2003; Toates, 2006; Strack & Deustch, 2004; Kahneman & Frederick, 2005; Evans, 2008; Glöckner & Betsch, 2008; Glöckner & Witteman, 2010; Kahneman, 2011; Stanovich, 2011; Evans & Stanovich, 2013; De Neys & Pennycook, in press), leading to a class of models that differ from each other in many details, not only in the names given to the two cognitive systems, but also in the specific functions that these systems are assumed to perform, to the point that these theories do not exactly map onto each other (Evans, 2008; Evans & Stanovich, 2013). In this review, I adopt the point of view of Evans and Stanovich (2013), who provided convincing evidence of the existence of a dual-processing distinction which, theoretically, can be explained by assuming the existence of “rapid, autonomous processes, Type 1, that are assumed to yield default responses unless intervened on by distinctive higher order reasoning processes (Type 2)”, which rely heavily on hypothetical thinking and working memory.
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