Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

Abstract

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an answer: people cooperate in an uncalculating way to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decisionmaking is operationalized by either a subject's choice of whether to reveal the precise costs of cooperating (Exp. 1) or the time a subject spends considering these costs (Exp. 2). In both experiments, we find that participants are more likely to engage in uncalculating cooperation when their decision-making process is observable to others. Furthermore, we confirm that people who engage in uncalculating cooperation are perceived as, and actually are, more trustworthy than people who cooperate in a calculating way. Taken together, these data provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, that uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness, and is not merely an efficient decision-making strategy that reduces cognitive costs. Our results thus help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors, such as extreme altruism, the use of ethical principles, and romantic love.reputation | social evaluation | decision-making | experimental economics | moral psychology

Cooperation driven by success-driven group formation

“…Several adequate suggestions have been made in the last decade which try to address the conflict of experiment and theory [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21]. One of these research directions assumed that more sophisticated strategies should be used, which go beyond the simplest unconditional cooperator and defector behaviors [22,23].…”

Can Strategic Ignorance Explain the Evolution of Love?

“…approach seems to be far rarer than a strategy that demands one's partner end their search while in a serious relationship. Furthermore, some empirical work suggests that more principled "non-lookers" are trusted more than calculating types in non-romantic domains (Critcher, Inbar, & Pizarro, 2013;Everett, Pizarro, & Crockett, 2016;Jordan, Hoffman, Nowak, & Rand, 2016;Sacco, Brown, Lustgraaf, & Hugenberg, 2017). There are several reasons why this might be the case.…”

Preferential interactions promote blind cooperation and informed defection

“…However, in reality, the partner's behavior during past interactions with others often provides further information regarding their quality, giving rise to reputation effects (34). In particular, seeking information can lead potential future partners to infer that the information gatherer is a less desirable partner, who is likely to cooperate only under a limited set of conditions, and therefore decline future interactions with him (23). Even when this avoidance is not intended to punish unreliable partners, it can still reduce their expected future payoffs and thus serve as an effective punishment that can enforce blind cooperation.…”

“…In this paper we first show thatalthough both manipulation and preferential interactions are usually invoked to explain aversion to information gathering (20)(21)(22)(23)(24)-the current implementation of the envelope game only captures manipulation. Next, we extend the framework to heterogeneous populations to include preferential interactions.…”