Spontaneous giving and calculated greed - Wouldn't the world be a better place if that were true - but apparently it is!!
For a long time now, man was considered to be just another animal with strong instincts for self-preservation. This made pro-social and altruistic behavior a puzzle for evolutionary biologists to solve. Why would evolution select for self-destructive behavior and how would that propagate? It is a fascinating question from an evolutionary perspective and people are still looking for the right answer/s. Many theories such as group selection, kin selection, social living, reciprocal altruism etc have been proposed over the years to explain the pro-social streak in our character. It has long been implicitly understood that human beings are inherently selfish creatures programmed by evolution for self-preservation. The better angels of our nature were thus considered to have evolved as an adaptation for social living (reciprocal altruism) and as an indirect way to preserving one's gene pool (group selection, kin selection)
However while cooperation is deemed central to human social behavior and requires individuals to incur a personal loss to benefit others, the underlying cognitive process was never really analyzed. Are people predisposed to selfishness, behaving cooperatively only through active self control; or are people inherently cooperative with reflection and prospective reasoning favoring "rational self-interest" ? Think about the question !
To me, this is a fascinating question and intuitively, I had almost always understood that it is rational thought that keeps our instinct for self preservation and selfish nature at bay. But like many things in science, this was a surprise too !
A recent report in Nature addresses this very question in a laboratory set up. They try and differentiate between our intuitive impulses and our reasoning abilities and their respective influences on our behavior.
Intuition is characterized by quicker, effortless, more automatic responses, made without insight into the decision process and with a strong emotional influence. Reflection on the contrary is associated with serial processing, effortful thought and rejection of emotional influence. Intuitive responses are also faster while the reflective responses take a while as multiple facets need to weighed and deliberated upon. This group has used time as a metric to distinguish between our natural impulses and our reflective responses.
In their experiment, they use a monetary index to measure the participants' pro-social tendencies. If you share more money - you are letting the better angels of your nature guide you and thus exhibiting cooperative/ prosocial behavior.
As part of their "game", 212 subjects were recruited using the online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) which the authors consider is providing a reliable, more diverse subject pool than the usual pool of college undergraduates who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’ and a biased representation in themselves... ;) As part of the experiment which was conducted in groups of 4, each subject was given a finite amount of cash (US $0.40) and they were asked to contribute an amount of their choice to a common pool. Any money contributed to the common pool was doubled and split evenly among the four members of the group. Rationally, it is more profitable for people to hold onto their money (0.40$ vs 0.80/5$ not knowing whether everyone will cooperate or not). Finally, the authors compared the decision times and the endowments made. They found that faster half of the decisions donated more money than the slower, more deliberated decisions (see below). They also found a linear relationship between the time taken and the amount donated. Quite intriguing to my mind but it is a correlation and doesn't suggest causality.
As part of their "game", 212 subjects were recruited using the online labor market Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) which the authors consider is providing a reliable, more diverse subject pool than the usual pool of college undergraduates who are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic, or ‘WEIRD’ and a biased representation in themselves... ;) As part of the experiment which was conducted in groups of 4, each subject was given a finite amount of cash (US $0.40) and they were asked to contribute an amount of their choice to a common pool. Any money contributed to the common pool was doubled and split evenly among the four members of the group. Rationally, it is more profitable for people to hold onto their money (0.40$ vs 0.80/5$ not knowing whether everyone will cooperate or not). Finally, the authors compared the decision times and the endowments made. They found that faster half of the decisions donated more money than the slower, more deliberated decisions (see below). They also found a linear relationship between the time taken and the amount donated. Quite intriguing to my mind but it is a correlation and doesn't suggest causality.
Now to test for causality, they again recruited around 680 subjects on the AMT as earlier and experimentally manipulated their decision times in their one shot Public Goods Game (PGG) as earlier. The subjects were put under a time constraint and were thus pressured to arrive at their decision quickly (within 10s). The decisions here are thus forced to be intuitive than reflective. Also, a "time delay" set up for the second group was also established where subjects were encouraged to weigh their options and were forced to wait for at least 10s before making a contribution. This is expected to drive reflection and careful reasoning. Consistent with the previous observation, they find that subjects forced to make an intuitive decision tend to contribute significantly more money to the group than the subjects in the time delay condition.
I particularly like their priming experiment wherein they recruited 343 more subjects and conceptually primed them for intuition or reflection. One group was primed to trust their intuition more when they were asked to write a paragraph about a situation in which their intuition led them in the right direction while careful reasoning has led them down the wrong path. The other group, primed for reasoning, was prompted to recall a situation in which intuition had led them the wrong way while careful reasoning had taken them in the right direction. And consistent with their findings till this point, the contributions to the pool were higher when people were primed to trust their intuition relative to the reflective process (see below).
This of course brings us back to the question which is one of the most difficult to answer in Science : Why?
Why are people intuitively predisposed to cooperation? The authors propose that people develop their intuitions in the context of everyday life where cooperation is typically advantageous since it is usually reciprocated and also because one's reputation is influenced by them. Further, since everyone grows up with the burden of social sanctions for one's actions and so we all develop cooperative and pro-social intuitions. And thus we need reflection to overcome this impulse and to adapt to situations which are not inherently advantageous to us (as in this experiment). The authors then try to test this hypothesis based on the assumption that greater familiarity with the laboratory cooperation experiments would attenuate these effects. They repeat their experiment of conceptual priming on a group of naive and experienced AMT subjects. Although I am not very convinced by this logic of theirs, I do appreciate the fact that they tried to test this theory. They do find that promoting intuition only increased cooperation in the subjects who were naive to the experiment. I would have liked to have seen this experiment in the pressured, time constraint set up because intuition, by definition is not something you can be trained for (so quickly at least!). And I would have liked to see, if the returning subjects perform differently when pressured for time.
The authors further state that the subjects will only be intuitively cooperative if in their daily-life setting cooperation is advantageous. And thus cooperation will only be favored if there are enough number of similarly cooperative people. And this to me is a lot more understandable but it does need rigorous tesing. It is often seen that in resource-poor nations, people are not very cooperative when it comes to limiting resources like money, space, food, etc because there are not enough people to reinforce a pro-social tendency with reciprocity. This, thus leads to a vicious cycle of hoarding and accumulation which widens the gulf between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'.
Based on their results the authors conclude that cooperation is culturally transmitted and is a product of social learning during development although it is tempting to conclude that 'cooperation' is innate or genetically hard-wired into us.
To my mind, what would also be interesting is to study the intuitive and reflective responses of people from different economies and different social backgrounds. The intuitive responses of children who are as yet uninfluenced by social mores would also be very revealing. But these, of course, remain questions for future studies.
And while the authors in this paper have explored the cognitive underpinnings of cooperation and pro-social tendencies in humans, there are a lot of questions that still remain to be addressed. To me however, this was a very interesting question with an equally interesting answer...
In fact, this paper reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's book titled "Blink". In the book, Gladwell, taps into examples and anecdotes from science, medicine, advertising, sales etc to establish an idea that spontaneous decisions, made in the blink of an eye, can often be as good - and sometimes even better than - carefully deliberated ones. He proposes that our mental processes and our adaptive unconscious have evolved to work rapidly and automatically from relatively little information.
Thus, on a superficial level, it seems that our intuitive decisions are in our best interest and that of others.
Thus, on a superficial level, it seems that our intuitive decisions are in our best interest and that of others.
I guess, even science is now telling us to live in the moment and go with our gut (microbiota or not)... ;)
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