Altruism, fast and slow? Evidence from a meta-analysis and a new experiment
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Altruism, fast and slow? Evidence from a meta‑analysis and a new experiment Hanna Fromell1 · Daniele Nosenzo2,3 · Trudy Owens3 Received: 30 November 2018 / Revised: 15 January 2020 / Accepted: 22 January 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Can we use the lens of dual-system theories to explain altruistic behavior? In recent years this question has attracted the interest of both economists and psychologists. We contribute to this emerging literature by reporting the results of a meta-study of the literature and a new experiment. Our meta-study is based on 22 experimental studies conducted with more than 12,000 subjects. We show that the overall effect of manipulating cognitive resources to promote the “intuitive” system at the expense of the “deliberative” system is very close to zero. One reason for this null result could be that promoting intuition has heterogeneous effects on altruism across different subgroups of subjects or contexts. Another reason could be that there simply is no real effect and that previously reported single results are false positives. We explore the role of heterogeneity both by performing a mediator analysis of the meta-analytic effect and by conducting a new experiment designed to circumvent the issue of potential heterogeneity in the direction of the effect of promoting intuition. In both cases, we find little evidence that heterogeneity explains the absence of an overall effect of intuition on altruism. Taken together, our results offer little support for dual-system theories of altruistic behavior. Keywords Altruism · Giving · Dictator game · Dual-system model · Intuition · Deliberation · Self-control · Willpower · Depletion · Stroop task JEL Classification C91
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1068 3-020-09645-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Daniele Nosenzo [email protected]; [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
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1 Introduction A recent literature in economics and psychology argues that human behavior can be understood as the interaction between two different decision systems (Kahneman 2002, 2011): one that is fast, intuitive, automatic and largely effortless (“System 1”), and one that is slower, more deliberate, and requires some level of reflection and cognitive effort (“System 2”). For some decisions, the two systems may diverge in the choices they favor: while deliberation may pull the individual towards a certain choice (e.g., keeping a healthy diet), intuition may pull them towards a different choice (e.g., eating tasty but highly caloric food). In these cases, an individual must use willpower and spend cognitive resources to override the intuitive impulse and take the choice favored by the deliberative system. It has been suggested that altruistic behavior can also be rationalized by this dual-system framework (Loewenstein and O’Donoghue 2007; Moor
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