Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

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 un...

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Published inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS Vol. 113; no. 31; pp. 8658 - 8663
Main Authors Jordan, Jillian J., Hoffman, Moshe, Nowak, Martin A., Rand, David G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States National Academy of Sciences 02.08.2016
Subjects
Biological Sciences
Choice Behavior - physiology
Cooperation
Cooperative Behavior
Decision Making
Ethics
Game Theory
Games, Experimental
Humans
Interpersonal Relations
Models, Psychological
Reputations
Risk assessment
Social Sciences
Trust - psychology
reputation
experimental economics
moral psychology
decision-making
social evaluation
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Summary: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 decision-making 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.
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Edited by Susan T. Fiske, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and approved June 14, 2016 (received for review January 23, 2016)
Author contributions: J.J.J., M.H., M.A.N., and D.G.R. designed research; J.J.J. performed research; J.J.J. and D.G.R. analyzed data; and J.J.J., M.H., M.A.N., and D.G.R. wrote the paper.
ISSN:0027-8424
1091-6490
1091-6490
DOI:10.1073/pnas.1601280113