Intuition and Deliberation in Morality and Cooperation: an Overview of the Literature

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a question that remains in relative neglect in the management literature-whether intuitions support ethical and cooperative behavior. It provides an overview of the literature and discuses the emerging picture on dual-process accounts of morality and cooperation. Despite the growing scholarship on the pros and cons of intuitive managerial decision-making, the literature understandably prioritizes the aspects of strategic business decisions and consequent corporate financial performance. A comparison of the heuristics-and-biases, ­simple-heuristics, and naturalistic decision-making accounts indicated that expertise is built on regular feedback from a learning-friendly environment and that intuitions tend to be reliable when expertise matches the decision environment. Evidence on the dual-process accounts of cooperation indicates that both social heuristics and self-control may regulate intuitive cooperation to an extent dependent on the problem at hand and on the associations it may induce.