Scarce and directly beneficial reputations support cooperation

Abstract

A human solution to the problem of cooperation is the maintenance of informal reputation hierarchies. Reputational information contributes to cooperation by providing guidelines about previous group-beneficial or free-rider behaviour in social dilemma interactions. How reputation information could be credible, however, remains a puzzle. We test two potential safeguards to ensure credibility: (i) reputation is a scarce resource and (ii) it is not earned for direct benefits. We test these solutions in a laboratory experiment in which participants played two-person Prisoner’s Dilemma games without partner selection, could observe some other interactions, and could communicate reputational information about possible opponents to each other. Reputational information clearly influenced cooperation decisions. Although cooperation was not sustained at a high level in any of the conditions, the possibility of exchanging third-party information was able to temporarily increase the level of strategic cooperation when reputation was a scarce resource and reputational scores were directly translated into monetary benefits. We found that competition for monetary rewards or unrestricted non-monetary reputational rewards helped the reputation system to be informative. Finally, we found that high reputational scores are reinforced further as they are rewarded with positive messages, and positive gossip was leading to higher reputations.

Local reputation, local selection, and the leading eight norms

“…From many potential candidates, previous research has identified the leading eight norms that can sustain large scale cooperation when information is publicly shared 23 , 25 . The assumption that reputational information is publicly and unbiasedly shared, however, is questionable 40 , 43 , 44 . Humans, if they wish to condition their action towards others appropriately, must rely on direct observation or on reputational information that originate from network contacts who can judge the individual accurately.…”

“…Group II social norms are characterised by rewarding justified defection ( ) 45 , where two disreputable interacting agents are both rewarded for defection by an improvement in their social standing 18 , 29 , 46 , 47 . Justified defection has been under scrutiny in empirical research and there is only mixed evidence about its relevance in human decision making 44 , 48 , 49 . For group II norms, defection against disreputable players is considered good behaviour as and .…”

No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour

“…One of the most obvious ways that observers might incur costs from the actions of helpful individuals is due to social comparison. A good reputation is, by definition, a positional good -a person's reputation is 'good' in relation to the reputations of other individuals to whom that individual is compared (Barclay, 2011(Barclay, , 2013(Barclay, , 2016Samu et al, 2020). Prosocial actions that improve one person's reputation (or can be construed as potentially doing so) can therefore provoke competitive responses from those whose reputation may suffer by comparison (e.g., (Herrmann et al, 2019;Macfarlan et al, 2012;McAndrew & Perilloux, 2012;Pleasant & Barclay, 2018;Raihani & Smith, 2015;Sylwester & Roberts, 2013)).…”

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

“…One of the most obvious ways that observers might incur costs from the actions of helpful individuals is due to social comparison. A good reputation is, by definition, a positional good -a person's reputation is 'good' in relation to the reputations of other individuals to whom that individual is compared (13,(139)(140)(141). Prosocial actions that improve one person's reputation (or can be construed as potentially doing so) can therefore provoke competitive responses from those whose reputation may suffer by comparison (e.g., (26,35,43,(142)(143)(144)).…”