Discussion

Tab. 3.24 - Mean offers given to each responder by participants who matched the right or wrong photos to the verbal description under the two modes of thinking

Results indicates that the right vs. wrong photo identification did not interact with the intuitive vs. analytical mode of thinking in determining the amount of money offered by participants to the responders.

- verifying whether different modes of thinking affect how persons share given money with another player.

As for the first issue, Study 4 confirmed what we found in the previous study, thus confirming that people can modulate their monetary offers strategically in order to be sure that their proposals would have been accepted. Relying on the responders’ psychological portraits people could vary their behaviour accordingly, thus indicating that the activation of relevant and consistent mindreading processes occurred. The findings of the present study provide further support to the conclusion we drew in Study 4, that is proposers probably realize when low offers may be rejected, so they maximize their gain by acting

“as if” they are fair. This apparent taste for fairness conceals in reality a great ability to be strategic by making those specific decisions which imply a renounce to the maximum “impossible” gain in favour of a less-than-maximum

“possible” one.

As for the two modes of thinking, it turned out that in the intuitive task proposers made offers which were clearly different in relation to the type of responder they were playing with. Specifically, under both intuitive and analytical conditions proposers offered more money to those responders who were supposed to reject low offers and less money to those who were supposed to accept even low offers, but, this differentiation sharpened in the intuitive condition. It seems that intuitive thinking can lead people to a more strategic and functional behaviour when making monetary decisions which imply the consideration of the opponent’s psychological features.

Intuition intensifies the ability, that people already possess, of behaving strategically when making economic decisions. Some possible explanations could be found by turning to the specific features of the task that people were asked to deal with in the present experiment. In fact, it has to be kept in mind that the efficiency of analytical and intuitive mode of thinking should not to be evaluated in an absolute way since their accuracy is modulated by the properties of the task that they face (Hammond et al., 1987; McMackin & Slovic, 2000). A

first characteristic which is worth taking into account is the amount of information people have to process during the task. Specifically, participants were requested to “picture” the other player by dealing with and then putting together a considerable amount of information presented trough different forms, verbal and visual together, in order to complete the task. In fact, they got information both reading the detailed responder’s description and looking at his/her photo, so that they had to handle information set in two different codes, the verbal and the visual ones. According to some recent studies (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Dijksterhuis et al., 2006) these stimuli characteristics, that is the presence of numerous relevant attributes to be processed should lead to an optimization of the decision at hand under the intuitive mode of thinking. The relative superiority of intuition under this circumstances could be explained through the limited processing capacity of the brain (Miller, 1956). In fact, when dealing with a large amount of relevant information, people run into a low processing capacity which did not allow them to take all information into account. This could be the case of the present work: the sheer amount of information involved in the task may be too much for deliberate analysis to tackle. Conversely, instead of a careful and detailed analysis of all information, it could be more efficient and functional employing a rapid integration of the information into global and holistic “impressions”. Further evidence comes from other studies (Pelham & Neter, 1995) which found that the inferiority of a deep analytical thought in making decisions with large amount of information can be explained by the fact that analytical processing reduces the chance that people take crucial information into consideration. Ironically, when information are too much, engaging into a precise and accurate analysis allows people neither to concentrate on all information at hand, nor to pick up and focus on those information which would be necessary and crucial to make that decision adequately.

A part from the large amount of information, another characteristic of the task which is worth considering is the object of the elaboration (intuitive or

analytical) processes, that is the other player whom people were playing with.

The “picturing” of other people is a common activity which probably is quite familiar to everyone. Previous research have shown that people can make affective judgments involving inferences others’ traits from photos quickly and almost automatically (Willis & Todorov, 2006). The importance of this ability is testified by the fact that people learn very early to understand others’

psychological characteristics and predict others’ behaviours. In fact, from the ability to grasp the essence of the people surrounding us, from the capacity to rapidly catch the psychological features of the people whom we continuously interact with, it depends the probability of living serenely and successfully. For this reason, people are quite used to “deal with” others’ psychological portraits, thus making the task of processing others’ psychological profile a quite habitual task. People are probably very familiar with this kind of task, and, as a consequence, they have developed across years a relevant expertise. Once people become familiar with and expert in picturing other people, this expertise could lead, to some extent, to automaticity. It could be the case that people are used to form an opinion about another person rapidly, almost automatically, without engaging in a detailed analysis of each single feature, but, rather, taking into account the entirety of that person. People have an implicit learning, accumulated across years, concerning the evaluation of others’ features. As a consequence, the intuitive thinking, which stems from implicit learning, could represent a better way of picturing the person we are interacting with as compared to the analytical thinking. Intuition could be the result of the experience that people have gained which allows them to form holistic, and complete impression of the other, in considerable low amount of time. For this reason, in our experiment, intuitive thinking could have led to a better differentiation of the responder types because this mode of elaboration is the most familiar and habitual way employed when picturing the others. Moreover, given the intrinsic quality of intuitive thinking, that is allowing to grasp the object to be evaluated in its entirety, it constitutes a better way to capture the

essence of a person as compared to the analytical thinking which, conversely, breaks up the object into details that makes it difficult to form a global impression going beyond each single particular (Stephen & Pham, 2008).

A further explanation for the superiority of intuition in our studies could be found if considering the output of intuitive processing. Different studies highlighted that intuition-based decisions tend to be more “gist-based” (Reyna &

Brainerd, 1995), that is relying on intuition leads to invoke condensed representations of the situation than relying on analysis which, conversely, induces to invoke more intricate representations of the situation (Epstein &

Pacini, 1999; Stephen & Pham, 2008). The reliance on intuitive thinking should lead to simpler, clearer (Stephen & Pham, 2008), more unambiguous (van Dijk

& Zeelenberg, 2006) and polarized (Dijksterhuis, 2004) representation of the situation at hand as compared to the reliance on analytical thinking. Ambiguity and uncertainty are poor represented in intuition (Kahneman, 2003), thus making intuitive thinking result in dichotomous representations. On the contrary, analytical thinking produces more elaborate construals that also include various implications and considerations resulting in less clear defined representations of the situation. In our experiment, this could have led people to clearly distinguish the different types of responder under the intuitive thinking, whereas they were induced to represent them in a less polarized way under the analytical thinking. This could explain why proposals made under the intuitive thinking were clearly differentiated in low or high offers, whereas proposals made under the analytical thinking were in-between.

Finally, an additional explanation for our results could derive from some studies carried out in the field of mindreading and empathy. An important finding concerns the fact that efficient mindreading abilities mostly rely on automatic processes. It seems that people represent the others’ mental states in terms of their own states, almost without being aware of it (Singer & Fehr, 2005). This mechanism could be explained by turning to the fact that, without thinking, the perceived intentions and expectations of other automatically activate brain

networks that also represent our own intentions and expectations. Some authors suggest that the so-called “mirror neurons”, which are supposed to represent the neural basis for mindreading and empathy, might provide people with an automatic simulation of others’ actions, intentions, and expectations (Gallese &

Goldman, 1998; Preston & de Waal, 2002). For this reason it could be argued that the intuitive thinking, which implies a rapid and automatic evaluation of the situation at hand, is more suitable for dealing with the attribution of mental states to the others. This could further accounts for intuition being the best way of processing information about others’ psychological portraits.

In conclusion, we are induced to believe that the activation of mindreading processes leads to behaviours which change depending on the psychological characteristics of the responders. Furthermore we can conclude that these behaviours are modulated by the joint effect of the other player’s psychological portrait and the mode of thinking employed in processing the information concerning him/her.