The Development of Social Exchange Under Incompatible Social Contingencies

Abstract

Matrix-gaming experiments on cooperation have typically structured some conflict between persons' outcomes whereas most reinforcement studies of cooperation have not. In two laboratory experiments, reinforcement principles were applied to the question of how cooperative social exchange can be established when persons' outcomes are negatively correlated and social exchange must consist of alternating behaviors and rewards. Two variables are manipulated in the first experiment: the presence or absence of direct reinforcement for alternating, and the presence or absence of information of the other person's reinforcement. Both variables effectively established social exchange but even in their absence, half of the dyads still learned to exchange by performing response patterns that provided contingency information to the other person. These results may hold only for very simple operants, however. When a two-response sequence was required for reinforcement in the second experiment, neither information of the other person's reinforcement nor particular response patterns provided sufficient cues for the dyads to learn to exchange.