Título: Ex-ante information design and agents’ tendency to cooperate: the impact on cognitive conflict and cooperation
Sala: E28
Hora: 12:30
Abstract: This study investigates how the design of ex-ante information affects team members’ cooperative decisions, depending on their “natural” inclination to cooperate (that is, on their instinctive tendency of being cooperative). How this design affects the cognitive conflict (a process in which contrary internal demands or forces oppose each other within the agent) is also analyzed. Finally, the relationship between cognitive conflict and cooperation is explored. To this aim, we design and experiment in which participants play three social dilemmas in pairs during 15 rounds. We manipulate the ex-ante information in three different ways: displaying only private and individual earnings (“I” frame), displaying the join earnings (“We” frame), and displaying both types of information (“I&We” frame). We measure the inclination to cooperate at the individual level through the HEXACO personality model and in particular, through the Honesty-Humility (HH) dimension. We classify agents as HH_highs (high tendency to cooperate) and HH_lows (low tendency to cooperate). We measure the cooperation level as the percentage of cooperative decisions and the level of cognitive conflict with mouse tracking software. We find that for HH_high agents, the design of ex-ante information does not affect cooperation levels, while it does affect cognitive conflict levels. The opposite happens for HH_low agents, that is, the ex-ante information design only affects the cooperation levels (being the “I&We” frame the best for cooperation) but not their cognitive conflict. Finally, we do not find any relationship between cognitive conflict and cooperative decisions except for HH_highs and for the “I&We” frame. Interestingly, the sign of this relationship varies depending on the type of the social dilemma.