Does Focality Depend on the Mode of Cognition? Experimental Evidence on Pure Coordination Games

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study how the mode of reasoning affects pure coordination in problems with and without an exogenous anchor that can serve as a focal point. The mode of reasoning is manipulated in the lab by requiring subjects to decide quickly (time pressure treatment) and, alternatively, by requiring subjects to motivate their decisions in a few lines of text (motivation treatment). This is meant to induce, respectively, a fast and intuitive mode of reasoning as opposed to a slow and deliberative one. Experimental data suggest that: (i) subjects take to the lab preexisting focalities that may have a common cultural root; (ii) the anchor is strongly focal and crowds out pre-existing focalities; (iii) such crowding out only happens for deliberative subjects. As a result, the anchor has an ambiguous effect on the overall ability of subjects to coordinate, making its desirability heavily dependent on the likelihood that subjects follow a slow and deliberative mode of reasoning.