Social Psychology, Vol 56(4), 2025, 190-201; doi:10.1027/1864-9335/a000585
Social interactions often involve conflicting demands, where pursuing one goal hinders another. Landkammer and Sassenberg (2016) studied the impact of co-opetition – the conflicting simultaneous demand to cooperate and compete with the same target – on cognitive flexibility. They found that compared to pure competition and cooperation, experiencing co-opetition increases cognitive flexibility (i.e., reduced rigidity in decision-making and generating more diverse ideas in a brainstorming task). Two conceptual and one direct replication (total N = 1,340) found no difference in cognitive flexibility contingent to interdependence, and Bayesian analysis showed strong evidence against an effect (BF10