Intuition and cooperation reconsidered

Arising from D. G. Rand, J. D. Greene & M. A. Nowak 489, 427–430 (2012)10.1038/nature11467Rand et al. reported increased cooperation in social dilemmas after forcing individuals to decide quickly. Time pressure was used to induce intuitive decisions, and they concluded that intuition promotes cooperation. We test the robustness of this finding in a series of five experiments involving about 2,500 subjects in three countries. None of the experiments confirms the Rand et al. finding, indicating that their result was an artefact of excluding the about 50% of subjects who failed to respond on time.