Dynamic indirect reciprocity: When is indirect reciprocity bounded by group membership?

Abstract

Indirect reciprocity is a strong driver of reputation-based cooperation and previous studies have offered ample evidence as to when and how it guides cooperation towards others. However, the current empirical literature suffers from mixed evidence about the realm of indirect reciprocity; some studies showed that people assume that in-group members, but not out-group members, belong to the same system of indirect reciprocity and they, thus, display reputation-based cooperation only towards in-group members (i.e., bounded indirect reciprocity). Other studies found that people display reputation-based cooperation towards out-group members as well (i.e., unbounded indirect reciprocity). It thus remains unclear when indirect reciprocity is bounded by group membership. We argue that the realm of indirect reciprocity is conditional to the presence of cues of reputational consequences (i.e., consequences of immediate cooperation). We further propose a new perspective, the dynamic indirect reciprocity perspective, which integrates the bounded and unbounded indirect reciprocity perspectives. We conducted a preregistered study (N = 1800) and found partial evidence for the perspective. First, between-condition differences in cooperation were very small and were not in line with the perspective. However, exploratory analyses on psychological underpinnings of intergroup cooperation revealed that a reputation manipulation (i.e., group membership knowledge manipulation) increased cooperation via increased expected cooperation from an immediate partner regardless of their group membership when the cue of reputational consequences was present. Yet, when the immediate partner was an in-group member, this indirect effect was observed when the cue of reputational consequences was absent. Overall, our findings underscore a new general principle of indirect reciprocity: the cue of reputational consequences determines the perceived realm of indirect reciprocity and influences whether or not individuals condition their cooperation to the group membership of immediate interaction partners.