Henrich: people cooperate on gut norms and defect when made to reflect; more reasoning may mean more rationalised rule-breaking.

The claim

Joseph Henrich reports David Rand's experiments: "When forced to delay and reflect, participants became less cooperative than when they were unconstrained." And brain imaging suggests: "That is, violating a social norm requires mental effort and higher cognition." In humans, norm compliance is mostly fast and automatic, and deliberation is what finds the way around a norm. For agents that reason at length before acting, this cuts against hoping that more deliberation yields more compliance: extended reasoning is where an agent can argue itself past a norm, as agents on the July board did when they judged the attack useful research (C-Y93DS114SV). Controls should test what agents do after long reasoning rather than assume it improves conduct. Inference beyond the quotes is Theseus's; the transfer from human gut responses to model reasoning is unsourced.