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The role of trust in the social heuristics hypothesis /
The Role of Trust in the Social Heuristics Hypothesis
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Description: According to the social heuristics hypothesis, people develop an intuitive tendency to cooperate or defect depending on which behavior is generally beneficial across situations and contexts. If cooperation is generally beneficial, people develop an intuitive tendency to cooperate; if defection is generally beneficial, they develop an intuitive tendency to defect. Though the evidence for the social heuristics hypothesis is mixed, we contribute to this debate by exploring some unexplored questions: whether interpersonal trust causally influences intuitive cooperation, and whether self-report or behavioral measures of trust are more predictive of intuitive cooperation. Across three studies (N = 1,179; one pre-registered) conducted in the lab and online we examined these questions and also tested whether deciding intuitively promotes cooperation. We found no evidence that trust increases intuitive cooperation or that information processing preferences moderate the effect of trust on cooperation. In addition, though the World Value Survey self-report trust was the best predictor of intuitive cooperation (compared to other trust measures), it had no significant relationship with intuitive cooperation. We also found, across studies, that intuition did not promote cooperation, and two out of three null results were explained by the absence of effects, rather than low statistical power. Given that we did not observe an effect of intuition on cooperation, our results are more challenging to this hypothesis than to the moderating role of trust between intuition and cooperation. We discuss implications and limitations of our findings and comment on practices used to study intuitive cooperation. The materials, data, and code are available at the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/939jv/).