Spontaneous people act more generously

Spontaneous decisions are more cooperative, longer thinking times encourage egoism

09/20/2012

Spontaneous people are less selfish and more willing to donate money. This is the finding of researchers from the US elite universities Havard and Yale in a recent study published in the journal „Nature“ has been published. Carefully considered decisions were thus basically more selfish than a spontaneous determination of the subjects.

„Cooperation is at the center of human social behavior“, David G. Rand, Joshua D. Greene and Martin A. Nowak write in their current post. However, the decision to cooperate is "usually associated with individual costs for the decision makers". The US scientists therefore asked themselves the question of the cognitive basis of cooperative actions. They reviewed as part of their current study, „whether people are predisposed to selfishness and behave cooperatively only through active self-control, or whether they are intuitively cooperative“ act. The quite surprising result: Selfless action apparently corresponds to our intuition, longer thinking leads to more egoistic decisions.

Cooperative behavior investigated in more than 2,000 subjects
In ten different tests, US scientists at Harvard University in Cambridge and Yale University in New Haven had analyzed the social behavior of more than 2,000 subjects. For example, study participants should donate money in an experiment. All participants knew that the amount would then be doubled by the gamemaster and split evenly among the players. However, subjects did not usually donate the full 50 cents they had, though the payout would have been the highest for all. The researchers also noted a significant correlation between the time it took the individual participants to think and the amount donated.

Longer consideration promotes selfish behavior
The study participants decided in less than ten seconds, they donated on average about 66 percent of their 50 cents. With a reflection period of more than ten seconds, the willingness to donate dropped to an average of 53 percent of the total balance. In the tests, no case has emerged in which the subjects decided after a longer period of consideration more generous, as in a spontaneous decision, write Rand, Greene and Nowak. In their opinion, cooperative behavior is the first natural reflex, but it is replaced by egoistic patterns of behavior after a relatively short period of reflection. This relationship between the period of consideration and the decreasing willingness to cooperate is in line with previous studies, which came to a similar conclusion.

Cooperative behavior as first intuition
According to the US scientists, the selfless action in spontaneous decisions or the intuitive inclination to cooperate is due to the fact that in everyday life one's own social reputation is endangered by self-serving behavior and the affected persons could possibly be ostracized socially. The more thoroughly the persons concerned weigh, the more this aspect seems to take a back seat. Rational considerations can lead to the first cooperative impulse being overcome, according to the researchers. „Encouraging decision-makers to be completely rational can have the unintended side-effect of making them more selfish“, write Rand and colleagues. „Our findings provide convergent evidence that intuition supports collaboration in social dilemmas and that reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses“, so the conclusion of the US scientists. (Fp)

Picture: Bernhard Pixler