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Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity—a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation; social dilemma understanding; perceptions of social appropriateness; beliefs about others’ cooperation; and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.

Religions promote cooperation, but they can also be divisive. Is religious cooperation intuitively parochial against atheists? Evidence supporting the social heuristics hypothesis (SHH) suggests that cooperation is intuitive, independent of religious group identity. We tested this prediction in a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma game, where 1,280 practising Christian believers were paired with either a coreligionist or an atheist and where time limits were used to increase reliance on either intuitive or deliberated decisions. We explored another dual-process account of cooperation, the self-control account (SCA), which suggests that visceral reactions tend to be selfish and that cooperation requires deliberation. We found evidence for religious parochialism but no support for SHH’s prediction of intuitive cooperation. Consistent with SCA but requiring confirmation in future studies, exploratory analyses showed that religious parochialism involves decision conflict and concern for strong reciprocity and that deliberation promotes cooperation independent of religious group identity. Protocol registration The Stage 1 protocol for this Registered Report was accepted in principle on 28 January 2020. The protocol, as accepted by the journal, can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12086781.v1 . In this Registered Report, Isler et al. test whether religious cooperation is intuitively parochial. They find evidence of religious parochialism but not intuitive cooperation. Exploratory analyses suggest that deliberation tends to promote cooperation in general.

Understanding human cooperation is a major scientific challenge. While cooperation is typically explained with reference to individual preferences, a recent cognitive process view hypothesized that cooperation is regulated by socially acquired heuristics. Evidence for the social heuristics hypothesis rests on experiments showing that time-pressure promotes cooperation, a result that can be interpreted as demonstrating that intuition promotes cooperation. This interpretation, however, is highly contested because of two potential confounds. First, in pivotal studies compliance with time-limits is low and, crucially, evidence shows intuitive cooperation only when noncompliant participants are excluded. The inconsistency of test results has led to the currently unresolved controversy regarding whether or not noncompliant subjects should be included in the analysis. Second, many studies show high levels of social dilemma misunderstanding, leading to speculation that asymmetries in understanding might explain patterns that are otherwise interpreted as intuitive cooperation. We present evidence from an experiment that employs an improved time-pressure protocol with new features designed to induce high levels of compliance and clear tests of understanding. Our study resolves the noncompliance issue, shows that misunderstanding does not confound tests of intuitive cooperation, and provides the first independent experimental evidence for intuitive cooperation in a social dilemma using time-pressure.

Aesthetic judgements are partly predicted by image statistics, although the extent to which they are calibrated to the statistics of real-world scenes and the ‘visual diet’ of daily life is unclear. Here, we investigated the extent to which the beauty ratings of Western oil paintings from the JenAesthetics dataset can be accounted for by real-world scene statistics. We computed spatial and chromatic image statistics for the paintings and a set of real-world scenes captured by a head-mounted camera as participants went about daily lives. Partial least squares regression (PLSR) indicated that 6–15% of the variance in beauty ratings of the art can be accounted for by the art’s image statistics. The luminance contrast of paintings made an important contribution to the PLSR models: paintings were perceived as more beautiful the greater the variation in luminance. PLSR models which expressed the art’s image statistics relative to real-world scene statistics explained a similar amount of variance to models using the art’s image statistics. The importance of an image statistic to perceived beauty was not related to how closely art reproduces the value from the real world. The findings suggest that beauty judgements of art are not strongly calibrated to the scene statistics of the real world.

Investigate the visibility of new and old red, white and pink cricket balls under lighting and background conditions experienced during a day–night cricket match. We modelled the luminance contrast signals available for a typical observer for a ball against backgrounds in a professional cricket ground, at different times of day. Spectral reflectance (light reflected as a function of wavelength) was derived from laboratory measurements of new and old red, white and pink balls. We also gathered spectral measurements from backgrounds (pitch, grass, sightscreens, crowd, sky) and spectral illuminance during a day–night match (natural afternoon light, through dusk to night under floodlights) from Lord's Cricket Ground (London, UK). The luminance contrast of the ball relative to the background was calculated for each combination of ball, time of day, and background surface. Old red and old pink balls may offer little or no contrast against the grass, pitch and crowd. New pink balls can also be of low contrast against the crowd at dusk, as can pink and white balls (of any age) against the sky at dusk. Reports of difficulties with visibility of the pink ball are supported by our data. However, our modelling also shows that difficulties with visibility may also be expected under certain circumstances for red and white balls. The variable conditions in a cricket ground and the changing colour of an ageing ball make maintaining good visibility of the ball a challenge when playing day–night matches.

Understanding our cognitive and behavioral reactions to large-scale collective problems involving health and resource scarcity threats, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, helps us be better prepared for future collective threats. However, existing studies on these threats tend to be restricted to correlational data, partly due to a lack of reliable experimental techniques for manipulating threat perceptions. In four preregistered experiments ( N  = 5152), we developed and validated an experimental technique that can separately activate perceptions of personal health threat or resource scarcity threat, either in the specific context of the COVID-19 pandemic or in general. We compared the threat manipulations to a relaxation manipulation designed to deactivate background threat perceptions as well as to a passive control condition. Confirmatory tests showed substantial activation of personal health and resource scarcity threat perceptions. This brief technique can be easily used in online experiments. Distress due to the threat manipulation was rarely reported and easily managed with a debriefing toolkit.

Compromised heat shock protein 90 (Hsp90) function reveals cryptic phenotypes in flies and plants. These observations were interpreted to suggest that this molecular stress-response chaperone has a capacity to buffer underlying genetic variation. Conversely, the protective role of Hsp90 could account for the variable penetrance or severity of some heritable developmental malformations in vertebrates. Using zebrafish as a model, we defined Hsp90 inhibitor levels that did not induce a heat shock response or perturb phenotype in wild-type strains. Under these conditions the severity of the recessive eye phenotype in sunrise, caused by a pax6b mutation, was increased, while in dreumes, caused by a sufu mutation, it was decreased. In another strain, a previously unobserved spectrum of severe structural eye malformations, reminiscent of anophthalmia, microphthalmia, and nanophthalmia complex in humans, was uncovered by this limited inhibition of Hsp90 function. Inbreeding of offspring from selected unaffected carrier parents led to significantly elevated malformation frequencies and revealed the oligogenic nature of this phenotype. Unlike in Drosophila, Hsp90 inhibition can decrease developmental stability in zebrafish, as indicated by increased asymmetric presentation of anophthalmia, microphthalmia, and nanophthalmia and sunrise phenotypes. Analysis of the sunrise pax6b mutation suggests a molecular mechanism for the buffering of mutations by Hsp90. The zebrafish studies imply that mild perturbation of Hsp90 function at critical developmental stages may underpin the variable penetrance and expressivity of many developmental anomalies where the interaction between genotype and environment plays a major role.

This paper reports the findings of two experimental investigations into the efficacy of a causal cognitive mapping procedure as a means for overcoming cognitive biases arising from the framing of strategic decision problems. In Study 1, final year management studies undergraduate students were presented with an elaborated strategic decision scenario, under one of four experimental conditions: positively vs. negatively framed decision scenarios, with prechoice vs. postchoice mapping task orders (i.e., participants were required to engage in cognitive mapping before or after making a decision). As predicted, participants in the postchoice mapping conditions succumbed to the framing bias whereas those in the prechoice mapping conditions did not. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings in a field setting, on a sample of senior managers, using a decision scenario that closely mirrored a strategic dilemma currently facing their organization. Taken together, the findings of these studies indicate that the framing bias is likely to be an important factor in strategic decision making, and suggest that cognitive mapping provides an effective means of limiting the damage accruing from this bias.