The Intuitive Cooperation Hypothesis Revisited: A Meta-analytic Examination of Effect-size and Between-study Heterogeneity

The hypothesis that intuition promotes cooperation has attracted considerable attention. We address the question with a meta-analysis of 82 cooperation experiments, spanning four different types of intuition manipulations—time pressure, cognitive load, depletion, and induction—including 29,087 participants in total. To our knowledge, this is the largest and most comprehensive data set to date. We obtain a positive overall effect of intuition on cooperation, though substantially weaker than that reported in prior meta-analyses, and between studies the effect exhibits a substantial degree of systematic variation. We find that this overall effect depends exclusively on the inclusion of six experiments featuring emotion-induction manipulations, which prompt participants to rely on emotion over reason when making allocation decisions. Upon excluding from the total data set experiments featuring this class of manipulations, between-study variation in the meta-analysis is reduced substantially—and we observed no statistically discernable effect of intuition on cooperation.