Three International Studies on Pure Coordination Games: Adaptable Solutions When Intuitions are Presumed to Vary

Pure coordination games involve players seeking to converge on identical responses without communication. Previous cognitive science research has focused on the reasoning and common knowledge necessary as the background conditions for coordination, with less attention paid to the challenge of intuiting specific responses on which coordination might be possible. Most existing studies have examined coordination within university student samples from a single country and so the extent of the challenge of coordinating between heterogenous groups of people may have been underestimated. We conducted three empirical studies (two pre-registered) with 520 participants from the UK, South Africa, and Chile, plus a globally distributed sample. Without communicating, participants were asked to coordinate on answers to simple questions such as “name a tourist city”. All groups coordinated at rates far above chance, but often coordinated on different responses. Study 1 showed that participants from one group could nevertheless anticipate the coordination solutions of another group. Studies 2 and 3 showed that participants could coordinate with a partner from a different group, often on answers that were rarely given when coordinating within groups, and whether or not they knew their partner’s country of origin. These findings provide evidence that coordination decisions are variable between groups, and flexible when thinking about different groups, resulting in accurate adaptations to achieve coordination. Where previous work has focussed predominantly on the forms of reasoning that support coordination, the present findings suggest that it is equally important to examine the content of coordination solutions and to understand what processes and what experiences support the flexibility and accuracy of people’s intuitive responses.