Human societies rely on shared conventions that allow people to coordinate efficiently, from the conversational etiquette and the “rules of the road” to workplace roles and the handshake economy. To be effective, the conventions must be reliable, and yet also adaptable: when circumstances change, people must decide whether to follow established precedents or shift to new ways of coordinating. Most cognitive and computational models explain either how coordination equilibria emerge and persist through learning from past experience, or how agents generate novel strategies to maximize anticipated mutual benefit. How people arbitrate between these two modes of coordination remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a computational model and experimental paradigm to study this arbitration. In two preregistered experiments (n = 510; 30,420 choices), participants repeatedly solved coordination problems in which established precedents could be followed or abandoned as their efficiency declined. Our results quantify the conditions under which individuals and pairs transition from entrenched coordination equilibria to new shared solutions, revealing a dynamic trade-off between the reliability of precedent and the potential gains from innovation. These findings provide a unified account of how coordination remains both stable and adaptable, offering new insights into the evolution of conventions, norms, and institutions.

Human coordination depends on two complementary mechanisms: forward-looking strategies that enable flexible adaptation to new circumstances, and backward-looking mechanisms that rely on precedent, convention, and rule-following. Most cognitive and computational models of coordination emphasize one mechanism or the other—either explaining how equilibria emerge and persist when agents adapt their behavior based on past experience, or how agents creatively generate novel solutions and strategies to achieve anticipated mutual benefit in the challenges of the moment—but not how the two interact. Here we introduce a cognitive model and experimental paradigm to capture the dynamics of both processes and, crucially, the arbitration between them. In two preregistered experiments (n = 510; 30,420 choices), participants repeatedly solve coordination problems that can be addressed either by generalizing past solutions or by adopting novel ones when precedent becomes inefficient. This design allows us to examine the conditions under which individuals or dyads decide to abandon entrenched equilibria and transition to novel coordination solutions by arbitrating between mutual benefit and precedent. By formally modeling both forward- and backward-looking mechanisms, and the process of arbitration between them, we provide a unified framework for understanding how human coordination can be both stable and adaptable—a property that underlies everyday cooperative behavior, social norms, and institutional evolution.

Face coverings can potentially impact how trustworthy someone appears through two channels: by hiding important facial cues associated with trust; or by signalling the wearer's intentions or personal characteristics. The facemasks widely adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic both obscured the face and were associated with pro-social attitudes or intentions. The goal of this paper is to investigate how facemasks impact judgments about the trustworthiness of the wearer, and whether this would affect interactions with others. We report three experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 examined decisions in a two-player trust game when participants interacted with a single masked or unmasked counterpart. Experiment 3 explored whether participants were more likely to trust a masked or an unmasked person in a straight choice between them. In all experiments, masked faces were judged more trustworthy than unmasked ones. While in Experiments 1 and 2 this was not reflected in trust behaviour, in Experiment 3 over 70% of participants chose to trust the masked person, a decision predicted by the difference in perceived trustworthiness between the masked and unmasked counterparts. This suggests that in settings where facemasks or similar trust related cues are more salient, such as in joint evaluation, they can lead to enhanced trust.

People solve a myriad of coordination problems without explicit communication every day. A recent theoretical account, virtual bargaining, proposes that, to coordinate, we often simulate a negotiation process, and act according to what we would be most likely to agree to do if we were to bargain. But very often several equivalent tacit agreements — or virtual bargains — are available, which poses the challenge of figuring out which one to follow. Here we take inspiration from virtual bargaining to develop a cognitive modeling framework for dynamic coordination problems. We assume that players recognize their common goal, identify one or more possible tacit agreements based on situational features, observe the history of their partner’s choices to infer the most likely tacit agreement, and play their role in the joint plan. We test this approach in two experiments (n = 125 and n = 133) based on a dynamic coordination game designed to elicit agreement-based behavior. We fit our model at the individual level and compare its performance against alternative models. Across four different conditions, our model performs best among the set of models considered. Behavioral results are also consistent with players sustaining coordination and cooperation in the task by converging on tacitly agreed strategies or “virtual bargains”.

The social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls has been widely influential in moral philosophy but has until recently received relatively little attention in moral psychology. For contractualist moral theories, ethics is a matter of forming, adhering to, and enforcing (hypothetical) agreements, and morality is fundamentally about acting according to what would be agreed by rational agents. A recent psychological theory, virtual bargaining, models social interactions in contractualist terms, suggesting that we often act as we would agree to do if we were to negotiate explicitly. However, whether such contractualist tendencies (a propensity to make typically contractualist choices) and forms of reasoning (agreement-based cognitive processes) play a role in moral cognition is still unclear. Drawing upon virtual bargaining, we develop two novel experimental paradigms designed to elicit incentivized decisions and moral judgments. We then test the descriptive relevance of contractualism in moral judgment and decision making in five preregistered online experiments (n = 4,103; English-speaking Prolific participants). In the first task, we find evidence that many participants show contractualist tendencies: their choices are “characteristically” contractualist. In the second task, we find evidence consistent with contractualist reasoning influencing some participants’ judgments and incentivized decisions. Our findings suggest that a propensity to act as prescribed by tacit agreements may be particularly important in understanding the moral psychology of fleeting social interactions and coordination problems. By complementing the rich literature on deontology and consequentialism in moral psychology, empirical approaches inspired by contractualism may prove fruitful to better understand moral cognition.

We show that patience is a key determinant of subjective well-being differences between countries. To address potential endogeneity bias, we apply an instrumental variable approach using the share of Protestants in the country, which prior literature has associated with patience and used as an instrument. While tentative, our findings are consistent with a sizable causal effect of patience on subjective well-being. They are robust across several specifications and hold for three different measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, positive affect, and negative affect.

The ability of teams to self-organize and engage in spontaneous collaboration is crucial to 21st-century organizations. The large extent of nonroutine activities in such organizations hampers the effectiveness of traditional management instruments, such as monitoring effort and performance levels and exercising fiat — resulting in increasingly important self-organized collaboration. To explain how such collaboration is possible, we suggest a refinement of the psychological assumptions underpinning influential theories of the firm — specifically, concerning how people reason. We juxtapose Nash reasoning (the mode of reasoning underpinning organizational economic theories of the firm) with virtual bargaining (a more collaborative mode of reasoning drawing on recent research in cognitive science). Virtual bargaining enables individuals to establish, maintain, and abide by tacit "social contracts" of their team and organization — the (often tacit) norms, rules, roles, and responsibilities governing how employees should behave (irrespective of their personal objectives). Thus, virtual bargaining helps individuals mitigate challenges of team production, such as shirking and hold-up, in a self-organizing and self-enforcing way. We analyze the conditions under which virtual bargaining leads individuals to coordinate on enhanced effort levels in organizationally relevant settings. We outline avenues for empirically testing virtual bargaining in organizations and discuss conceptual implications.

People often make, and are held to account for, purely tacit commitments in interactions with other people: commitments that have never been explicitly articulated or agreed. Moreover, unspoken, tacit commitments are often perceived as binding: people often stick to, and are expected to stick to, these commitments, even where it might seem against their interests to do so. If they do not stick to these commitments, they may be punished, and expect to be punished, by others as a result, even if the act of punishment is itself costly for the punisher. These commitments have been widely seen as a crucial underpinning for human collaboration and cooperation. Yet how do such commitments arise, and are they compatible with human rationality? This paper provides a formal, reasoning-based account of tacit commitments based on “virtual bargaining”—a mode of reasoning that joins elements of individualistic and collaborative reasoning. We complement existing accounts by showing that even purely self-interested individuals can, under certain conditions, tacitly commit to punishing counterparts who violate an unenforceable agreement, or to cooperating in dynamic games, including the Centipede game and the finitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

Social interaction is both ubiquitous and central to understanding human behavior. Such interactions depend, we argue, on shared intentionality: the parties must form a common understanding of an ambiguous interaction (e.g., one person giving a present to another requires that both parties appreciate that a voluntary transfer of ownership is intended). Yet how can shared intentionality arise? Many well-known accounts of social cognition, including those involving "mind-reading," typically fall into circularity and/or regress. For example, A's beliefs and behavior may depend on her prediction of B's beliefs and behavior, but B's beliefs and behavior depend in turn on her prediction of A's beliefs and behavior. One possibility is to embrace circularity and take shared intentionality as imposing consistency conditions on beliefs and behavior, but typically there are many possible solutions and no clear criteria for choosing between them. We argue that addressing these challenges requires some form of we-reasoning, but that this raises the puzzle of how the collective agent (the "we") arises from the individual agents. This puzzle can be solved by proposing that the will of the collective agent arises from a simulated process of bargaining: agents must infer what they would agree, were they able to communicate. This model explains how, and which, shared intentions are formed. We also propose that such "virtual bargaining" may be fundamental to understanding social interactions.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, governments around the world have recommended or required minimum physical distancing between individuals, as well as either mandating or recommending the use of face coverings (masks) in certain circumstances. When multiple risk reduction activities can be adopted, people may engage in risk compensation by responding to a reduced (perceived) risk exposure due to one activity by increasing risk exposure due to another. We tested for risk compensation in two online experiments that investigated whether either wearing a mask or seeing others wearing masks reduced physical distancing. We presented participants with stylized images of everyday scenarios involving themselves with or without a mask and a stranger with or without a mask. For each scenario, participants indicated the minimum distance they would keep from the stranger. In line with risk compensation, we found that participants indicated they would stand, sit, or walk closer to the stranger if either of them was wearing a mask. This form of risk compensation was stronger for those who believed masks were effective at preventing catching or spreading COVID-19, and for younger (18-40 years) compared to older (over 65 years) participants.

Sociological debates on financialisation emphasise that workplace-based productivity bargains between employers and employees are often precarious. This literature suggests that where employers are unable to keep their side of the bargain, participative arrangements with employees are likely to become unsustainable in generating high workplace performance. Recessions substantially increase the pressures on employers to breach (unwritten and invisible) implicit bargains with employees. We propose that a robust (rather than shallow) implementation of union voice and Human Resource Management (HRM) practices will make implicit bargains more resilient and benefit workplace performance if recession impact is high. Using two waves of the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey (2004 and 2011), we examine our hypotheses in the context of the deep 2008-2009 recession and find supportive evidence - especially in (a) firms without a dominant individual or family owner and (b) growing markets.

May provides a compelling case that reasoning is central to moral psychology. In practice, many morally significant decisions involve several moral agents whose actions are interdependent - and agents embedded in society. We suggest that social life and the rich patterns of reasoning that underpin it are ethical through and through.

Hubris among corporate leaders has recently gained much academic attention, with strategy and corporate governance research focusing mainly on negative aspects, such as overreach by strategic leaders during acquisitions. However, adjacent disciplines including entrepreneurship and innovation identify positive consequences too. How comparable are these findings? Appraising the conceptual and methodological approaches, we find that while the hubris concept has many strengths, several challenges remain. We suggest conceptual and empirical research directions aimed at increasing construct clarity, validating the hubris construct and extending the scope of hubris research. We also propose that research with boards and top management teams can help clarify how they make decisions to cope with the ‘dark side’ of hubris without suppressing ‘bright side’ outcomes.

People often make, and are held to account for, purely tacit commitments in interactions with other people: commitments which have never been explicitly articulated or agreed. Moreover, unspoken, tacit commitments are often perceived as binding: people often stick to, and are expected to stick to, these commitments, even where it might seem against their interests to do so. These commitments have been widely seen as crucial underpinning for human collaboration and cooperation. Yet how do such commitments arise, and are they compatible with human rationality? This paper provides a formal, reasoning-based account of tacit commitments based on “virtual bargaining”—a mode of reasoning that joins elements of individualistic and collaborative reasoning. We complement existing accounts by showing that even purely self-interested individuals can, under certain conditions, tacitly commit to punishing counterparts who violate an unenforceable agreement, or to cooperating in the Centipede game and the finitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game.

People often make, and are held to account for, purely tacit commitments in interactions with other people: commitments which have never been explicitly articulated or agreed. Moreover, unspoken, tacit commitments are often perceived as binding: people often stick to, and are expected to stick to, these commitments, even where it might seem against their interests to do so. These commitments have been widely seen as crucial underpinning for human collaboration and cooperation. Yet how do such commitments arise, and are they compatible with human rationality? This paper provides a formal, reasoning-based account of tacit commitments based on “virtual bargaining”—a mode of reasoning that joins elements of individualistic and collaborative reasoning. We complement existing accounts by showing that even purely self-interested individuals can, under certain conditions, tacitly commit to punishing counterparts who violate an unenforceable agreement, or to cooperating in the Centipede game and the finitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game.