No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour

Abstract

Performing costly helpful behaviours can allow individuals to improve their reputation. Those who gain a good reputation are often preferred as interaction partners and are consequently better able to access support through cooperative relationships with others. But investing in prosocial displays can sometimes yield social costs: excessively generous individuals risk losing their good reputation, and even being vilified, ostracised or antisocially punished. As a consequence, people frequently try to downplay their prosocial actions or hide them from others. In this review, we explore when and why investments in prosocial behaviour are likely to yield social costs. We propose two key features of interactions that make it more likely that generous individuals will incur social costs when: (i) observers infer that helpful behaviour is motivated by strategic or selfish motives; and (ii) observers infer that helpful behaviour is detrimental to them. We describe how the cognition required to consider ulterior motives emerges over development and how these tendencies vary across cultures – and discuss how the potential for helpful actions to result in social costs might place boundaries on prosocial behaviour as well as limiting the contexts in which it might occur. We end by outlining the key avenues and priorities for future research.

The psychological foundations of reputation-based cooperation

“…For example, theory of mind allows audiences to infer a helper's intentions in order to predict future cooperation and thus allows individuals to signal not just their ability but their willingness to help. Therefore, although simple forms of reputation-based partner choice might be achieved without the advanced socio-cognitive mechanisms we discuss in this paper, we note that reputation-based partner choice can later evolve to become cognitively quite complex, particularly when helpful individuals have an incentive to misrepresent their type to others and when receivers take hidden intentions of partners into consideration when evaluating prosocial acts (see [84] for a detailed discussion).…”

Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures

“…Such services, however, also present opportunities for individual costs and collective action dilemmas. Despite dominance, high status, or leadership status, thirdparty individuals who resolve conflicts individuals may face reputational costs (Raihani and Power 2021) and may face counter-punishment or aggressiveness from individuals in conflict if the mediation is perceived as unjust (Jensen 2010;Bøggild and Petersen 2016). Between-group dynamics, including competition between dominant or high ranking individuals, can also promote within-group cooperation and disproportionate group investment by high ranking individuals, which could include costly conflict resolution services (Gavrilets and Fortunato 2014).…”

The psychological foundations of reputation-based cooperation

“…For example, theory of mind allows audiences to infer a helper's intentions in order to predict future cooperation and thus allows individuals to signal not just their ability but their willingness to help. Therefore, although simple forms of reputation-based partner choice might be achieved without the advanced socio-cognitive mechanisms we discuss in this paper, we note that reputation-based partner choice can later evolve to become cognitively quite complex, particularly when helpful individuals have an incentive to misrepresent their type to others and when receivers take hidden intentions of partners into consideration when evaluating prosocial acts (see Raihani & Power, 2021 for a detailed discussion).…”