Dynamic modulation of social influence by indirect reciprocity

Abstract

Indirect reciprocity is a pervasive social norm that promotes human cooperation. Helping someone establishes a good reputation, increasing the probability of receiving help from others. Here we hypothesize that indirect reciprocity regulates not only cooperative behavior but also the exchange of opinions within a social group. In a novel interactive perceptual task (Experiment 1), we show that participants relied more on the judgments of an alleged human partner when a second alleged peer had been endorsing participants’ opinions. By doing so, participants did not take into account the reliability of their partners’ judgments and did not maximize behavioral accuracy and monetary reward. This effect declined when participants did not expect future interactions with their partners, suggesting the emergence of downstream mechanisms of reciprocity linked to the management of reputation. Importantly, all these effects disappeared when participants knew that the partners’ responses were computer-generated (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that, within a social group, individuals may weight others’ opinions through indirect reciprocity, highlighting the emergence of normative distortions in the process of information transmission among humans.

Timing of social feedback shapes observational learning in strategic interaction

“…Conversely, if sophisticated actors receive feedback from an agent who is known to be successful and show a behavior similar to theirs, they can positively reinforce their strategy. This is in line with research highlighting the benefits arising from the gathering of different opinions in multi-agent systems 57 – 61 .…”

I'm not a little kid anymore! Reciprocal social influence in child–adult interaction

“…This result held when controlling for informational factors associated with the perception of the two agents' abilities, such as estimation accuracy, agents' response distance and performance ratings. The emergence of reciprocal behaviour is inconsistent with Bayesian principles of information aggregation [9,73,74,82], which would predict higher participants' susceptibility during an interaction with an unsusceptible partner, since, from an informational point of view, susceptibility can be interpreted as a signal of behavioural uncertainty or incompetence. For this reason, reciprocal behaviour in social influence contexts is generally interpreted as an inherently normative mechanism sustained by the desire to maintain influence over others and avoid the distress of being ignored [73,74,83].…”

“…The emergence of reciprocal behaviour is inconsistent with Bayesian principles of information aggregation [9,73,74,82], which would predict higher participants' susceptibility during an interaction with an unsusceptible partner, since, from an informational point of view, susceptibility can be interpreted as a signal of behavioural uncertainty or incompetence. For this reason, reciprocal behaviour in social influence contexts is generally interpreted as an inherently normative mechanism sustained by the desire to maintain influence over others and avoid the distress of being ignored [73,74,83]. By contrast, younger children (6-and 8-year-olds) did not change their final decisions as a function of the partner's behaviour.…”

“…Interestingly, recent evidence [73] has shown that reciprocity can modulate social influence and advice taking in adult dyads: people tend to take more into account the opinion of someone who, in turn, shows high consideration towards their judgements. Another recent study [74] has shown that reciprocity of social influence emerges also indirectly in triadic relationships between adults. These results highlight that reciprocity regulates not only cooperative behaviour but also the exchange of information between adult individuals, which does not follow purely Bayesian principles of information aggregation [9].…”

“…When children's beliefs and information from adults are in conflict, children may be unwilling to accept novel information and learn from adult informants [75]. In this context, children might claim a certain degree of consideration from adults in order to accept this new information, following the reciprocal mechanisms of social influence observed in dyadic and triadic interactions between adults [73,74]. In this sense, the emergence of social norms such as reciprocity might sustain child-adult interaction and collaboration, promoting children's learning by social interaction with adults.…”