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

In pure coordination games players aim to give the same response without communication. 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 responses on which coordination might be possible. Most studies have examined coordination within university 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 participants from the UK, South Africa, and Chile, plus a globally distributed sample (total N=520). Without communicating, participants were asked to coordinate on answers to simple questions such as “name a 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 responses of another group, while Studies 2 and 3 showed that participants could coordinate with a partner from a different group. Crucially, between-group partners most often coordinated on new responses that were rarely considered for within-group coordination, providing the strongest evidence to date to support Schelling’s claim that coordination requires distinctive reasoning, beyond primary and secondary salience. These findings provide evidence that coordination decisions are variable and flexible, 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.