What makes people sometimes willing to put "We" ahead of "Me?"

My friend Julianne pointed me to an interesting article in Science Daily on the choice between cooperation and self-interest. Harvard scientists have shown that people's first response is to cooperate and that stopping to think encourages selfishness. Two scientists have published new findings in the September 20 issue of Nature.

They recruited thousands of participants to play a "public goods game" in which it's "Me" vs. "Us." Subjects were put into small groups and faced with a choice: Keep the money you've been given, or contribute it into a common pool that grows and benefits the whole group. Hold onto the money and you come out ahead, but the group does best when everyone contributes. 

The researchers wanted to know whether people's first impulse is cooperative or selfish. To find out, they started by looking at how quickly different people made their choices, and found that faster deciders were more likely to contribute to the common good. 

Next they forced people to go fast or to stop and think, and found the same thing: Faster deciders tended to be more cooperative, and the people who had to stop and think gave less. 

Next they forced people to go fast or to stop and think, and found the same thing: Faster deciders tended to be more cooperative, and the people who had to stop and think gave less. 

Finally, the researchers tested their hypothesis by manipulating people's mindsets. They asked some people to think about the benefits of intuition before choosing how much to contribute. Others were asked to think about the virtues of careful reasoning. Once again, intuition promoted cooperation, and deliberation did the opposite.

I recently posted on experiments using the Trolley Problem that suggested that the brain generates two possible solutions to that ethical problem: one that came more quickly and seemed instinctive and one that came more slowly and seemed to be more reasoned. The result reported above would seem to be a similar example of two brain systems, one generating a rapid response (perhaps more instinctive) for cooperation, and the other a slower, more contemplative response to promote self interest. Again, we think with our brains, not just our (conscious) minds.

The article goes on to state:

While some might interpret the results as suggesting that cooperation is "innate" or "hard-wired," if anything they highlight the role of experience. People who had better opinions of those around them in everyday life showed more cooperative impulses in these experiments, and previous experience with these kinds of studies eroded those impulses. 

"In daily life, it's generally in your interest to be cooperative," Rand said. "So we internalize cooperation as the right way to behave. Then when we come into unusual environments, where incentives like reputation and sanctions are removed, our first response is to keep behaving the way we do in normal life. When we think about it, however, we realize that this is one of those rare situations where we can be selfish and get away with it."

This of course is an alternative interpretation of the observation -- fast responses are from habit (not instinct) while slower responses (as I suggested) are more the product of logical thought. Science works by observation. There might be alternative hypotheses as to why the things observed happen, and a scientist would normally propose new experiments to discredit one or the other hypothesis.