Cognitive Modes, Social Motives and Prosocial Behavior

This project brings together a variety of competences and methods to address an issue that has recently gained attention by scholars working at the intersection of different disciplines: economics, psychology, sociology, cognitive sciences. The issue under debate concerns the interaction between cognitive modes and prosocial behavior, i.e., the extent to which individual behavior is beneficial to the society as a whole. The basic question is: which cognitive mode is more likely to foster prosocial behavior? Up to now, such a debate is lively and far from being set. Indeed, the literature provides both conflicting theoretical arguments and inconclusive empirical evidence (see the state of the art in B.1.2).

Our hypothesis is that the different definitions of intuition used in the literature can, to some extent, explain opposing results in the analysis of intuitive behavior and prosociality.

The project investigates four research lines:

(1) from a theoretical perspective, we aim at providing an evolutionary explanation of the linkage between social motives and prosocial behavior in each cognitive mode;

(2) from a methodological perspective, we aim at identifying effective methods to manipulate the cognitive mode of subjects in an experimental setting (the aim is to be able to promote reliance on automatic intuition, conscious intuition and deliberation);

(3) from a behavioral perspective, we aim at understanding how cognitive modes and social motives interact to determine actual prosocial behavior;

(4) again from a behavioral perspective, we aim at understanding how cognitive modes affect the degree of discrimination of prosocial behavior (i.e., to what extent prosocial behavior is limited to interactions with individuals similar to the decision-maker).

By developing these research lines, we can obtain a rationalization of apparently conflicting evidence provided by the literature and, more in general, we can foster the understanding of the relationship between cognitive modes and prosocial behavior, as mediated by social motives.