Direct Manipulation of Dual Systems in Decision-making Problems with Time Pressure

Abstract

In an anonymous 4-person economic game, participants contributed more money to a common project when asked to decide quickly than when asked to delay their decision (Rand, Greene & Nowak, 2012). When induced to make a more intuitive decision, people were more likely to cooperate, a finding contrary to the traditional economic and evolutionary idea that people behave in their own interest by default. A recent meta-analysis (Rand, 2016) supports this “social heuristic” hypothesis, although the results of studies using time pressure have been mixed, with some replication attempts observing similar effects (Protzko et al 2016, Rand et al 2014) and others observing null effects (Tinghög et al 2013, Verkoeijen et al 2014). This Registered Replication Report (RRR) assessed the size and variability of the effect of time pressure on cooperative decisions by combining 21 separate, pre-registered replications of the critical conditions from Study 7 of the original finding (Rand et al., 2012).

The primary planned analysis included participants who did not comply with the time constraints (65.9% in time pressure and 7.5% in forced delay in the RRR), and revealed a difference in contributions of -0.10 percentage points, compared to an 8.6 percentage point difference calculated from the original data. Analyzing the data as the original paper did, excluding data from participants who did not comply with time constraints, we observed a 10.49 percentage point difference in contributions compared to a 15.31 percentage point difference in the original study. Additional analyses examined the effect when excluding participants who had prior experience with studies of this sort (-2.12 percentage points), failed to comprehend the task (-0.57 percentage points) or were excluded for any of these three reasons (12.36 percentage points). In the discussion, we address the similarities and discrepancies between the RRR results and those of the original study.