Signaling benefits of partner choice decisions.

Abstract

When deciding whom to choose for a cooperative interaction, two features of prospective partners are especially relevant: ability to provide benefits, and willingness to provide those benefits. Often, these traits are correlated. But, when ability and willingness are in conflict, people often indicate that they value willingness over ability, even when doing so results in immediate losses. Why would such behavior be favored by natural selection acting at the level of the individual? Across nine experimental studies (seven preregistered) and a mathematical model we explore one way of explaining this costly choice, demonstrating that choosing a willing over an able partner affords one a moral reputation and makes one more likely to be chosen as a cooperation partner. In fact, even people who choose an able over a willing partner for themselves prefer others who choose a willing over an able partner. Crucial to our model, we find that valuing willingness over ability is an honest signal of both higher levels of generosity in an economic game and lower levels of trait Machiavellianism. These findings provide the first extensive exploration of the signaling benefits of partner choice decisions. Furthermore, this work provides one explanation for why we choose those who are willing over those who are able, even at a cost to ourselves: By doing so, we in turn look like good potential partners.

Young children's adaptive partner choice in cooperation and competition contexts

“…Note that children did not generally prefer generous partners in the knowledge or speed task or in the post-test preference test. This finding is interesting in light of recent work suggesting that adults place greater value on the willingness to provide benefits than on factors like competence or a partners' access to resources (Dhaliwal et al, 2022;Eisenbruch & Roney, 2017;Raihani & Barclay, 2016). is thought to reflect a partner-choice strategy tailored to the conditions that were characteristic of the ecologies in which human social cognition evolved, where generosity varied more than competence between partners (Eisenbruch & Krasnow, 2022).…”

Rational inferences about social valuation

“…Indeed, many aspects of human social cognition appear to be regulated by inferences about how much someone values your welfare. When people have to choose between partners, they prefer those who appear to value them-even over potential partners who generate more resources for them but value them less (Lim, 2012;Eisenbruch and Roney, 2017;Hackel et al, 2015;Hackel et al, 2020;Raihani and Barclay, 2016, see also Sznycer et al, 2019;Dhaliwal et al, 2022). Social perception tends to prioritize traits such as "warmth" or "generosity" (which in many cases track how much someone values your welfare) over traits related to competence (reviewed in Eisenbruch & Krasnow, 2022;Fiske et al, 2007).…”

Why Warmth Matters More Than Competence: A New Evolutionary Approach

“…Recently, a signaling-based explanation for the tendency to choose generous over productive partners has been offered (Dhaliwal et al, 2021). On this account, people who choose generous over productive partners are themselves seen as more generous, moral, and fairer (whereas people who make the opposite choice are seen as more logical and competent), and these reputational benefits cause such people to themselves be chosen more often as cooperative partners.…”

“…Recently, researchers have used economic tasks to examine people’s choices between potential cooperative partners who vary in both WTR (typically operationalized as the share of a resource that they offer) and productivity (the value of the resource they have access to). Participants’ choices often reveal a stronger preference for WTR than productivity, effectively caring more about the relative size of the slice they are offered than the size of the pie it comes from (Delton & Robertson, 2012; Eisenbruch & Roney, 2017; Hackel et al, 2015; Raihani & Barclay, 2016; Robertson et al, 2017; but for boundary conditions on the effect, see Dhaliwal et al, 2021). Note that these effects exist even when participants can tell that weighing WTR more heavily than productivity is inconsistent with the incentive structure of the experiment.…”