Is Cooperation Intuitive? A Systematic Preregistered Test of the Social Heuristics Hypothesis
The Social Heuristics Hypothesis (SHH) posits that cooperation in social dilemmas is intuitive, arising from internalized prosocial heuristics shaped by repeated everyday interactions. However, the empirical foundation of this claim has become increasingly uncertain. Early supportive findings were frequently low-powered and not preregistered, and recent meta-analytic evidence indicates that the intuitive-cooperation effect is small and largely driven by a limited subset of emotion-induction manipulations with substantial demand characteristics. When these studies are excluded, support for a general intuitive advantage in cooperation weakens markedly. We reassess SHH using a preregistered, high-powered design that prioritizes construct-valid cognitive manipulations and systematic variation of contextual cues. Our central evidence comes from a 30-condition between-subjects experiment (N = 2,290 U.S.-based Prolific participants) crossing two dilemma structures (public goods provision vs. maintenance), three framing conditions (cooperation, competition, neutral), and five cognitive-style manipulations (emotion prime, time pressure, time delay, debiasing training, control). The study was powered to detect small effects, and inference combined conventional hypothesis testing with equivalence and Bayesian analyses. Despite successful manipulation checks, we observe no reliable main or interaction effects of cognitive style on cooperation, and estimated effects are statistically equivalent to negligible magnitudes. These findings replicate across additional preregistered, high-powered studies within our research program (total N = 4,688), where transient shifts between intuitive and reflective processing similarly fail to produce consistent cooperative changes. To further clarify the determinants of cooperation, we applied the ABC framework, which conceptualizes behaviour as the interaction of Attitudes (cooperative preferences), Beliefs (expectations about others), and Contributions (actual decisions). Integrating preferences and expectations reveals that stable belief-preference structures account for substantial variation in cooperative behaviour. Together, these findings suggest that SHH, as a general model of intuitive cooperation in one-shot economic games, lacks empirical robustness and requires substantial theoretical refinement.