Hostname: page-component-7b9c58cd5d-g9frx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-15T17:43:44.285Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cognitive processes underlying distributional preferences: a response time study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Fadong Chen  and
Urs Fischbacher Open the ORCID record for Urs Fischbacher [Opens in a new window]
Fadong Chen*
Affiliation:
School of Management, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China Neuromanagement Lab, Zhejiang University, 310058 Hangzhou, China
Urs Fischbacher*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Konstanz, Universitätsstr. 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany Thurgau Institute of Economics, Hauptstr. 90, 8280 Kreuzlingen, Switzerland
*
[email protected]
[email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

There is ample evidence that people differ considerably in their preferences. We identify individual heterogeneity in type and strength of social preferences in a series of binary three-person dictator games. Based on this identification, we analyze response times in another series of games to investigate the cognitive processes of distributional preferences. We find that response time increases with the number of conflicts between individually relevant motives and decreases with the utility difference between choice options. The selfish motive is more intuitive for subjects who are more selfish. Our findings indicate that the sequential sampling process and the intuition of selfishness jointly produce distribution decisions, and provide an explanation for the mixed results on the correlations between response time and prosociality. Our results also show that it is important to take heterogeneity of preferences into account when investigating the cognitive processes of social decision making.

Keywords

Distributional preferencesCognitive processResponse timeHeterogeneity

JEL classification

D30: General A12: Relation of Economics to Other Disciplines D87: Neuroeconomics C91: Laboratory, Individual Behavior C72: Noncooperative Games
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , June 2020 , pp. 421 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Economic Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-019-09618-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

References

Achtziger, A, & Alós-Ferrer, C (2014). Fast or rational? A response-times study of Bayesian updating. Management Science, 60(4), 923–938.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Alós-Ferrer, C, & Strack, F (2014). From dual processes to multiple selves: Implications for economic behavior. Journal of Economic Psychology, 41, 1–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Andreoni, J, & Miller, J (2002). Giving according to GARP: An experimental test of the consistency of preferences for altruism. Econometrica, 70(2), 737–753.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bear, A, & Rand, DG (2016). Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(4), 936–941.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bolton, GE, & Ockenfels, A (2000). ERC: A theory of equity, reciprocity, and competition. American Economic Review, 90(1), 166–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breitmoser, Y (2013). Estimation of social preferences in generalized dictator games. Economics Letters, 121(2), 192–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brocas, I, & Carrillo, JD (2014). Dual-process theories of decision-making: A selective survey. Journal of Economic Psychology, 41, 45–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruhin, A, Fehr-Duda, H, & Epper, T (2010). Risk and rationality: Uncovering heterogeneity in probability distortion. Econometrica, 78(4), 1375–1412.Google Scholar
Cappelen, AW, Nielsen, UH, Tungodden, B, Tyran, J-R, & Wengström, E (2016). Fairness is intuitive. Experimental Economics, 19(4), 727–740.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cappelletti, D, Güth, W, & Ploner, M (2011). Being of two minds: Ultimatum offers under cognitive constraints. Journal of Economic Psychology, 32(6), 940–950.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Celeux, G, & Soromenho, G (1996). An entropy criterion for assessing the number of clusters in a mixture model. Journal of Classification, 13(2), 195–212.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chaiken, S, & Trope, Y (1999). Dual-process theories in social psychology, New York: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Charness, G, & Rabin, M (2002). Understanding social preferences with simple tests. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 117(3), 817–869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, F, & Krajbich, I (2018). Biased sequential sampling underlies the effects of time pressure and delay in social decision making. Nature Communications, 9(1), 3557.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cone, J, & Rand, DG (2014). Time pressure increases cooperation in competitively framed social dilemmas. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e115756.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Cornelissen, G, Dewitte, S, & Warlop, L (2011). Are social value orientations expressed automatically? Decision making in the dictator game. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(8), 1080–1090.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dickhaut, J, Smith, V, Xin, B, & Rustichini, A (2013). Human economic choice as costly information processing. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 94, 206–221.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Duffy, S, & Smith, J (2014). Cognitive load in the multi-player prisoner’s dilemma game: Are there brains in games?. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 51, 47–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dufwenberg, M, & Kirchsteiger, G (2004). A theory of sequential reciprocity. Games and Economic Behavior, 47(2), 268–298.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Engelmann, D, & Strobel, M (2004). Inequality aversion, efficiency, and maximin preferences in simple distribution experiments. American Economic Review, 94(4), 857–869.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Erlei, M (2008). Heterogeneous social preferences. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 65(3–4), 436–457.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, AM, Dillon, KD, & Rand, DG (2015). Fast but not intuitive, slow but not reflective: Decision conflict drives reaction times in social dilemmas. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(5), 951–966.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Falk, A, & Fischbacher, U (2006). A theory of reciprocity. Games and Economic Behavior, 54(2), 293–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, E, & Schmidt, KM (1999). A theory of fairness, competition, and cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 114(3), 817–868.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fiedler, S, Glöckner, A, Nicklisch, A, & Dickert, S (2013). Social value orientation and information search in social dilemmas: An eye-tracking analysis. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 120(2), 272–284.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischbacher, U (2007). z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments. Experimental Economics, 10(2), 171–178.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisman, R, Kariv, S, & Markovits, D (2007). Individual preferences for giving. American Economic Review, 97(5), 1858–1876.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frederick, S (2005). Cognitive reflection and decision making. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19(4), 25–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frydman, C, & Nave, G (2016). Extrapolative beliefs in perceptual and economic decisions: Evidence of a common mechanism. Management Science, 63(7), 2340–2352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fudenberg, D, & Levine, DK (2006). A dual-self model of impulse control. American Economic Review, 96(5), 1449–1476.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greiner, B (2015). Subject pool recruitment procedures: Organizing experiments with ORSEE. Journal of the Economic Science Association, 1(1), 114–125.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grün, B, & Leisch, F (2008). FlexMix Version 2: Finite mixtures with concomitant variables and varying and constant parameters. Journal of Statistical Software, 28(4), 1–35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauge, KE, Brekke, KA, Johansson, L-O, Johansson-Stenman, O, & Svedsäter, H (2016). Keeping others in our mind or in our heart? Distribution games under cognitive load. Experimental Economics, 19(3), 562–576.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Houser, D, Keane, M, & McCabe, K (2004). Behavior in a dynamic decision problem: An analysis of experimental evidence using a Bayesian type classification algorithm. Econometrica, 72(3), 781–822.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hutcherson, CA, Bushong, B, & Rangel, A (2015). A neurocomputational model of altruistic choice and its implications. Neuron, 87(2), 451–462.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahneman, D (2003). A perspective on judgment and choice: Mapping bounded rationality. American Psychologist, 58(9), 697–720.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kahneman, D (2011). Thinking, fast and slow, New York: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Kerschbamer, R (2015). The geometry of distributional preferences and a non-parametric identification approach: The equality equivalence test. European Economic Review, 76, 85–103.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krajbich, I, Armel, C, & Rangel, A (2010). Visual fixations and the computation and comparison of value in simple choice. Nature Neuroscience, 13(10), 1292–1298.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krajbich, I, Bartling, B, Hare, T, & Fehr, E (2015). Rethinking fast and slow based on a critique of reaction-time reverse inference. Nature Communications, 6, 7455.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krajbich, I, Hare, T, Bartling, B, Morishima, Y, & Fehr, E (2015). A common mechanism underlying food choice and social decisions. PLoS Computational Biology, 11(10), e1004371.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Krajbich, I, Oud, B, & Fehr, E (2014). Benefits of neuroeconomic modeling: New policy interventions and predictors of preference. American Economic Review, 104(5), 501–506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lohse, J, Goeschl, T, & Diederich, JH (2017). Giving is a question of time: Response times and contributions to an environmental public good. Environmental & Resource Economics, 67(3), 455–477.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lotito, G, Migheli, M, & Ortona, G (2013). Is cooperation instinctive? Evidence from the response times in a public goods game. Journal of Bioeconomics, 15(2), 123–133.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLachlan, GJ, & Basford, KE (1988). Mixture models: Inference and applications to clustering, New York: M. Dekker.Google Scholar
McLachlan, G. J., & Jones, P. N. (1988). Fitting mixture models to grouped and truncated data via the EM algorithm. Biometrics, 571–578.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McLachlan, GJ, Lee, SX, & Rathnayake, SI (2019). Finite mixture models. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 6, 355–378.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merkel, AL, & Lohse, J (2019). Is fairness intuitive? An experiment accounting for subjective utility differences under time pressure. Experimental Economics, 22(1), 24–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murphy, RO, Ackermann, KA, & Handgraaf, MJ (2011). Measuring social value orientation. Judgment and Decision Making, 6(8), 771–781.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nielsen, UH, Tyran, J-R, & Wengström, E (2014). Second thoughts on free riding. Economics Letters, 122(2), 136–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peysakhovich, A, & Rand, DG (2016). Habits of virtue: Creating norms of cooperation and defection in the laboratory. Management Science, 62(3), 631–647.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Piovesan, M, & Wengström, E (2009). Fast or fair? A study of response times. Economics Letters, 105(2), 193–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rabin, M (1993). Incorporating fairness into game theory and economics. American Economic Review, 83(5), 1281–1302.Google Scholar
Rand, DG, Brescoll, V, Everett, JA, Capraro, V, & Barcelo, H (2016). Social heuristics and social roles: Intuition favors altruism for women but not for men. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(4), 389–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rand, DG, Greene, JD, & Nowak, MA (2012). Spontaneous giving and calculated greed. Nature, 489(7416), 427–430.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rand, DG, Peysakhovich, A, Kraft-Todd, GT, Newman, GE, Wurzbacher, O, Nowak, MA, & Greene, JD (2014). Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation. Nature Communications, 5, 3677.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ratcliff, R (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85(2), 59–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ratcliff, R, & Smith, PL (2004). A comparison of sequential sampling models for two-choice reaction time. Psychological Review, 111(2), 333–367.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rubinstein, A (2007). Instinctive and cognitive reasoning: A study of response times. The Economic Journal, 117(523), 1243–1259.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schulz, JF, Fischbacher, U, Thöni, C, & Utikal, V (2014). Affect and fairness: Dictator games under cognitive load. Journal of Economic Psychology, 41, 77–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloman, SA (1996). The empirical case for two systems of reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1), 3–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strack, F, & Deutsch, R (2004). Reflective and impulsive determinants of social behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(3), 220–247.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Tinghög, G, Andersson, D, Bonn, C, Böttiger, H, Josephson, C, Lundgren, G, & Johannesson, M (2013). Intuition and cooperation reconsidered. Nature, 498(7452), E1–E2.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Verkoeijen, PP, & Bouwmeester, S (2014). Does intuition cause cooperation?. PLoS ONE, 9(5), e96654.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Supplementary material: File

Chen and Fischbacher supplementary material

Chen and Fischbacher supplementary material
Download Chen and Fischbacher supplementary material(File)
File 479.2 KB