  Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot
interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus
deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among
people living in a cooperative setting and with no previous experience in
economic games on cooperation (history-dependence). Here we report on a lab
experiment exploring how these findings transfer to a non-cooperative setting.
We find two major results: (i) promoting intuition versus deliberation has no
effect on cooperative behavior among inexperienced subjects living in a
non-cooperative setting; (ii) experienced subjects cooperate more than
inexperienced subjects, but only under time pressure. These results suggest
that cooperation is a learning process, rather than an instinctive impulse or a
self-controlled choice, and that experience operates primarily via the channel
of intuition. In doing so, our findings shed further light on the cognitive
basis of human cooperative decision-making and provide further support for the
recently proposed Social Heuristics Hypothesis.
