Cognitive reflection and strategic decision-making in social dilemmas

Determine whether cognitive reflection, as measured by performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, is associated with strategic decision-making in social dilemmas such as the Incremental Centipede Game.

Background

The paper examines whether individual characteristics help explain deviations from game-theoretic rationality in the Incremental Centipede Game. Social Value Orientation scores are associated with reaching later terminal nodes, whereas the Cognitive Reflection Test does not show a statistically significant relationship with game outcomes in the reported experiment.

The authors therefore leave unresolved whether cognitive reflection is genuinely linked to strategic decision-making in social dilemmas. Establishing such a relationship would require additional experiments, potentially addressing the limited statistical evidence and concerns about familiarity effects associated with repeated exposure to standard Cognitive Reflection Tests.

References

However, the estimated coefficients are not significant, and more experiments are needed to prove whether there exists a link between cognitive reflection and strategic decision-making in social dilemmas.

— The prospect of a fair outcome triggers prosocial behaviour in the Centipede Game  (2609.39426 - Saponara et al., 30 Sep 2026) in Section “Results and discussion,” subsection “Prosocial players tend to reach later terminal nodes.”