Abstract
The threat of free-riding makes the marshalling of cooperation from group members a fundamental challenge of social life. Where classical social science theory saw the enforcement of moral boundaries as a critical way by which group members regulate one another’s self-interest and build cooperation, moral judgments have most often been studied as processes internal to individuals. Here we investigate how the interpersonal expression of positive and negative moral judgments encourages cooperation in groups and prosocial behavior between group members. In a laboratory experiment, groups whose members could make moral judgments achieved greater cooperation than groups with no capacity to sanction, levels comparable to those of groups featuring costly material sanctions. In addition, members of moral judgment groups subsequently showed more interpersonal trust, trustworthiness, and generosity than all other groups. These findings extend prior work on peer enforcement, highlighting how the enforcement of moral boundaries offers an efficient solution to cooperation problems and promotes prosocial behavior between group members.
Highlights
The “cooperation problem” refers to the challenge groups face in motivating their members to set aside narrow self-interest to make costly contributions to collective efforts[1,2,3,4,5]
Our experiment addresses the impact of interpersonal moral judgments and material sanctions on both public goods contributions and downstream prosocial behaviors in groups of anonymous strangers
Recent research has yielded critical insights into how people form internal moral judgments, but has less often studied the communication of moral judgments to fellow group members, and how expressed judgements may impact individuals and groups. This is a surprising omission given research establishing the powerful role of reputational processes in fostering cooperation and prosocial behavior[4,5,21,30]
Summary
The “cooperation problem” refers to the challenge groups face in motivating their members to set aside narrow self-interest to make costly contributions to collective efforts[1,2,3,4,5]. Because individuals deeply value moral praise and fear moral condemnation, the prospect of interpersonal moral judgments can serve as a powerful tool for maintaining social order and motivating actions that benefit groups or group members. This view contrasts with dominant explanations of the impact of peer sanctions, which focus on how material sanctions lead would-be free-riders to contribute their share to group efforts[13]. Given that moral judgments are generally presumed to be based in sincere prosocial motivations, we expect that targets of moral judgments will be less apt to respond with recrimination, compared with targets of material punishment
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