Direct and indirect reciprocity among individuals and groups

Angelo Romano,Ali Seyhun Saral,Junhui Wu

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.003

Abstract

Direct and indirect reciprocity are two fundamental mechanisms that promote prosocial behavior within groups and across societies. Here, we review recent work that illustrates how a (direct and indirect) reciprocity framework can illuminate our understanding of several factors related to prosocial behavior — namely group membership, gossip, and third-party punishment. We propose that each of these factors can promote prosocial behavior via proximate psychological mechanisms related to direct and indirect reciprocity: reputational concern, expectations, and anticipation of future interaction. Finally, we discuss the implications of adopting such a framework and highlight a number of avenues for future research.

Highlights

A large body of literature has examined prosocial behavior by looking at situations where people pay a monetary cost to benefit unrelated strangers
We focus on a set of psychological mechanisms related to direct and indirect reciprocity that can explain how people behave across several situations
The goal of this review was to present the empirical evidence that illustrates how a reciprocity framework can help us understand the role of several factors affecting prosocial behavior

Summary

Introduction

A large body of literature has examined prosocial behavior by looking at situations where people pay a monetary cost to benefit unrelated strangers (for a review on experimental games see Van Dijk and De Dreu [1] and Thielmann et al [2]). (a) shows how the effects of group membership and cues of gossip on one’s own prosocial behavior are explained by reputational concern, expectations, and anticipation of future interaction. This finding further supports the idea that expectations (via upstream indirect reciprocity) govern group relations [30] In line with this argument, past positive (or negative) interactions between ingroup and outgroup members are shown to be relevant in moderating ingroup favoritism in economic transactions between refugees in Syria and Iraq [31]. Recent research supports the potential role of psychological mechanisms related to a reciprocity framework in explaining why people engage in third-party punishment. Future cross-societal research is needed to investigate whether crosssocietal variation in prosocial behavior is explained by differences in reputational concerns, expectations, and anticipation of future interactions across societies

Conclusions

15. Leimgruber KL

29. Velez JA

32. Emler N