Abstract
When there is an opportunity to gain a positive reputation, individuals are more willing to sacrifice their immediate self-interest. Partner choice creates opportunities for competitive altruism, i.e. individuals compete to be regarded as more generous and to be chosen for future partnerships. Tests of the competitive altruism hypothesis have focused so far on reputation based on direct observation, whereas the role of gossip has not been theoretically and empirically addressed. Partner choice can create an incentive to cooperate and to send truthful messages, but it can also work in the opposite direction. In order to understand the consequences of partner choice on cooperation and gossip, we designed an experimental study in which participants played a sequence of Public Goods games and gossip rounds. In our two treatments, we observed that cooperation increased when there was an opportunity to be selected, but also that cooperators sent more honest messages than defectors, and that this strategy was prevalent in the treatment in which inter-group competition was implemented. We also found evidence that participants detached themselves from the information more often when lying. Taken together, our study fills a theoretical and empirical gap by showing that partner choice increases both cooperation and honesty of gossip.This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.
Highlights
Reputation has been convincingly argued to be a key ingredient of cooperation in humans [1,2,3,4]
Mutualistic theories of cooperation [19] and the competitive altruism hypothesis [20,21] pose that gaining a good reputation is essential for stabilizing cooperation, because co-operators will compete to be chosen by other co-operators, while defectors will be selected out
If having a good reputation allows one to enter into profitable partnerships, in a social dilemma cooperation can persist through competition with other cooperators
Summary
Reputation has been convincingly argued to be a key ingredient of cooperation in humans [1,2,3,4]. It is defined as a ‘shared evaluation that others hold about these actors with regard to one or more criteria’ [5]. Reputation allows individuals to form expectations about prospective partners’ behaviours, but it motivates people to sacrifice their immediate self-interest in order to engage in cooperative interactions in the future. Large groups can be seen as a market-place in which individuals would trade as buyers and sellers of cooperation in order to form the most successful coalitions [17,18]. Mutualistic theories of cooperation [19] and the competitive altruism hypothesis [20,21] pose that gaining a good reputation is essential for stabilizing cooperation, because co-operators will compete to be chosen by other co-operators, while defectors will be selected out
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