Expectations Of Reciprocity Research Articles

Context‐specific effects on reciprocity in mentoring relationships: ethical implications

Reciprocity is fundamental to effective mentoring relationships. However, we argue that it is inappropriate, and perhaps unethical, to expect comparable levels of reciprocity in all mentoring relationships. Instead, contextual factors influence optimal levels of reciprocity. Foremost is the developmental stage of the protégé, with less mature, relatively inexperienced protégés generally less capable of forming and maintaining a reciprocal relationship with their mentors than are more mature, relatively experienced protégés. We discuss three examples of contextual variables that can affect appropriate levels of reciprocity—the academic research apprenticeship, gender, and culture—and argue that mentors’ expectations of reciprocity necessarily must be adjusted in order to achieve ethical mentoring within these contexts.

Public and Private Forms of Opportunism within the Organization: A Joint Examination of Budget and Effort Behavior

ABSTRACT: We assert that some forms of opportunistic behavior within the organization are relatively transparent and, therefore, public in nature. Further, while organizations can tightly control such public opportunism, it may not be optimal for them to do so in the presence of private opportunism. To study how public and private forms of opportunism differ and interact, we jointly examine budget and effort behavior in a participative budgeting experiment. We group participants into producer/manager pairs and set the parameters such that the producer extracts the largest share of surplus from the manager by publicly setting the budget at zero and privately providing low effort. When the producer unilaterally sets the budget, the public opportunism of budgetary slack is higher and more affected by learning than the private opportunism of low effort. Giving the manager the power to reject the budget not only reduces budgetary slack by about 50 percent, but also generates reciprocity expectations and behavior. In particular, managers who allow more budgetary slack expect and receive higher effort from their producers on average. This reciprocity increases organizational performance by increasing the expected pay of the manager without decreasing the expected pay of the producer.

Security: always too much and never enough Anthropology of a non-starter market

The security market, based on public Key Infrastructures (PKI) did not succeed because security remains a paradoxical market. We observed security practices and reciprocal expectations, in this study the ones generated by the design of PKI devices. Using the framework of Actor Network Theory, we describe all the mediations required for sustaining a digital security chain... often based on very material stuff. A whole vision of the world should be designed, an ontology, doomed to failure if it formats practices and users by constraint. This vision should retain a variable-geometry, while calling on guarantors that transcend it, and not merely on commercial certification authorities. Will security architecture design be able to integrate the users' demand for adequate security, which renders security policies bearable as long as users are not aware of them?

Trust and reciprocity behavior and behavioral forecasts: Individuals versus group-representatives

Individuals are often given the responsibility of making decisions on behalf of a group or an organization. However, little is known about preferences or behavior in such contexts. In an adapted trust game, I examine whether the perspectives and behavior of group-representatives differ from those of the same individuals in an analogous situation. Group-representatives are given the responsibility of unilaterally and privately making a decision on behalf of a three-person group. Results from both the main and the follow-up studies show that people trust less and reciprocate less as group-representatives, and thus demonstrate that the interindividual-intergroup discontinuity effect not only exists in group behavior but also in individual behavior of group-representatives. Moreover, results show that trusting behavior is driven by reciprocity expectations, while reciprocating behavior is not sensitive to the first mover's behavior, i.e., the level of trust experienced.

Trust and Reciprocity: Groups versus Individuals and Behavior versus Perceptions

This paper examined the impact of the consensus-making mechanism, where members reach a common decision via an intra-group discussion, on intergroup trust and reciprocity in a strategic setting. Data from a laboratory trust game with salient financial incentives generated the following results. First, compared to individual decision-makers, consensus groups exhibited a) lower psychological trust, b) higher behavioral trust, after controlling for psychological trust, and c) lower reciprocity. Second, compared to decisions made by autonomous group representatives, who are given the responsibility of unilaterally making a decision for his/her group, group consensus decisions were more trusting but less reciprocating. Thus, the specific decision-making mechanism adopted by groups in a strategic interaction may profoundly change the nature and the interplay of the interaction. Lastly, results show that trusting behavior is driven by reciprocity expectations, while reciprocating behavior is not sensitive to the first mover's behavior, i.e., the level of trust experienced.

Motives for giving information in non‐work contexts and the expectations of reciprocity. The case of environmental activists

AbstractInformation sharing stands for a two‐way activity in which information is given and received in the same context. The present study reviews information sharing from the viewpoint of information giving. The empirical analysis draws on interviews with twenty environmental activists in Finland, 2005. Three major motives for information giving in non‐work contexts were identified: first, seredipitous altruism to provide help to other people, second, pursuit of the ends of seeking information by proxy, and third, duty‐driven needs characteristic of persons elected to positions of trust. Since in most cases information giving was driven by altruistic motives, the lack of reciprocity did not in practice weaken the motives for information giving. However, in the case of sensitive information, information giving tends to be restricted by calculations of the risk of information leakage against benefits obtained from the personally rewarding experience of providing important information to others.

The Social Order of Markets

In this article I develop a proposal for the theoretical vantage point of the sociology of markets, focusing on the problem of the social order of markets. The initial premise is that markets are highly demanding arenas of social interaction, which can only operate if three inevitable coordination problems are resolved. I define these coordination problems as the value problem, the problem of competition and the cooperation problem. I show that these problems can only be resolved based on stable reciprocal expectations on the part of market actors, which have their basis in the socio-structural, institutional and cultural embedding of markets. The sociology of markets aims to investigate how market action is structured by these macrostructures and to examine the change of institutions, networks and cultural frames of market action.

A Study on How Young Doctors and Patients Perceive the Doctor-patient Relationship

Purpose: We specifically investigated the young doctor (residents) patient doctor-patient relationship in Korea. A society built on Confucianism, age is expected to affect even the doctor-patient relationship. Methods: 57 residents participated and answered 6 open-ended questions. 90 patients of various age participated and answered 3 open-ended and 6 close-ended questions. Results: It seems that the general problem of the doctor-patient relationships was related to attitudes and communication skills. Over 80% of the residents felt uncomfortable and received inappropriate verbal expressions and attitudes from their patients simply because they were young or younger than the patients. This negative experience resulted mostly from the residents` self-perceived lack of experience and clinical competence and the patients` distrust of young doctors. As for the patients, over 80% preferred middle-aged doctors to young doctors. Middleaged doctors were thought to be easier to understand, better mannered, more humane, and clinically competent. Most residents expected professional respect from their patients, while patients expected kindness and humility from the young doctors. This shows a gap in the reciprocal expectations between residents and patients. Conclusion: Young doctors are perceived as inexperienced and incompetent and, consequently, not trusted by patients in Korea. To improve the resident-patient relationship, improvement in attitude and communication skills is needed.

Job referral in China: The advantages of strong ties

There is evidence for the importance of strong ties in job referral among Chinese working people. The principle of reciprocity in exchange theory has been used as an explanation for this. According to the theory, a job seeker who has more resources is more appealing to a matchmaker, who is then more likely to refer the job seeker to a more rewarding job. A strong tie acts to enhance the expectation of reciprocity from the referred person. This study of Chinese working people in Shanghai seeks to identify the effect of strong ties on job referral. The results point to the advantages of having strong ties in job referral, which include not just earnings but also satisfaction from the referred job. Importantly, people with more resources benefit more from job referral through a matchmaker, particularly when the tie with the matchmaker is strong.

Evidential Reasoning in the Prisoner’s Dilemma

Classic game theory considers defection to be the rational choice in the Prisoner's Dilemma. Although defection maximizes a player's gain regardless of the opponent's choice, many players cooperate. We suggest that cooperation can be explained in part by expectations of reciprocal behavior, that is, by the belief that players facing the same situation probably will come to the same decision. In Experiment 1, expectations of reciprocity were experimentally manipulated. As predicted, cooperation increased monotonically with these expectations. In Experiment 2, experimentally manipulated expectations of opponent cooperation were not associated with higher rates of cooperation. These findings are interpreted in light of a general model of payoff maximization, and implications for other models (e.g., social value orientation) are discussed.

Nuclear Stability, Deterrence and Separation of India's Civil and Weapon Facilities

The 18 July Bush-Manmohan Agreement is currently being implemented, in bits and pieces. At the time of the signing of the agreement it was stated by different officials that both governments would proceed to unilaterally implement the provisions that pertained to them and there would be no expectations of reciprocity. Following US Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns' visit to India in October 2005 there is a clearer understanding of Washington's expectations of New Delhi, before President Bush approaches Congress to amend certain portions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act 1978 (NNA) that strengthened the US Atomic Energy Act 1954. Clearly India needs to achieve a substantial or meaningful fissile material to reserve ratio to ensure that it can go through with a workable plan on separating its civilian and weapons facilities while safeguarding the independence of its deterrent.

Reflections on Culture and Social-Scientific Models

In an article published recently in this journal, Alan Kirk offered fresh insights into a long-standing problem by using an anthropological model of reciprocity.1 Kirk dissolved the tension between the seemingly reciprocal Do unto others and the more exclusive Love your enemy by showing that the texts presuppose but deliberately challenge ancient expectations of reciprocity. Kirk's article provides us with an opportunity to reflect on the importance of methodological clarity, especially in the form of constructing (and choosing) culture-appropriate models. The timing of this opportunity is good because the use of anthropological and sociological models in biblical exegesis is becoming more popular. A consistent thorn in the side of social-scientific criticism, among other fields, has been the validity of applying models cross-culturally.2 In most instances this concerns taking models developed in the modern world (e.g., honor and shame, psychoanalysis, functionalism, cognitive dissonance, rational choice theory) and applying them to the ancient world. Questions of this sort are valid and the responses complex, but we have in Kirk's article a different sort of cross-cultural application of a model. By relying on a model of reciprocity developed in primitive cultures and applied to the Greco-Roman world, Kirk forces us to consider whether all ancient (or premodern) cultures are the same, or whether their differences require alterations in the models we use to understand them. The essay by Marshall Sahlins that forms the backbone of Kirk's model of reciprocity is entitled On the Sociology of Primitive Exchange and was published in a book entitled Stone Age Economics.3 The titles here are telling. Sahlins was studying primitive cultures, which he defined as those lacking a political state, found most commonly in the form of hunter and gatherer tribes.4 In this sense, Sahlins cannot have imagined that his model of reciprocity would be abstract enough to apply to all cultural and social situations, least of all archaic, premodern, or modern contexts, that is, those with a state and central form of government such as existed in the Greco-Roman period that Kirk studies. The cultural and social presuppositions and context employed by Sahlins work directly against any attempt to apply the model unaltered across cultures. In primitive societies, Sahlins surmised that reciprocity could be understood as a linear plane at the ends of which sit two poles characterized by, respectively, selfless and selfish behavior. The basis of all premarket exchange, for Sahlins and other economic anthropologists, is the social relationship-material flow underwrites or initiates social relations.5 All forms of exchange inaugurate a social relationship of some sort. For this reason, Sahlins differentiated his types of reciprocity based on an understanding of social distance (how far from the kinship center does an exchange occur?). Modeled as a series of concentric circles, a society based on kinship has the household and immediate family at the center. Just beyond, yet still closely related to the household, sits the village. Beyond the village sits the tribe, another level removed from the family, and beyond that the greater world in which intertribal exchanges would occur. Within this social structure, reciprocity is differentiated by two factors: whether imbalance in exchange can be tolerated, and how long one is willing to wait for reciprocation. When social distance changes, these two factors change accordingly. Sahlins thus founded his three types of reciprocity-generalized, balanced, and negative reciprocity-on the combination of social distance and the allowable time line of reciprocation. Though these types of reciprocity are well known today, a brief look at them helps to clarify their cultural limitations. Sahlins's generalized reciprocity includes a broad range of exchanges, but they are for the most part united by the degree of intimacy between giver and receiver and by the relative degree of selflessness and compassion that characterizes the giving: the pure gift (such as a mother's breast-feeding), the free gift (such as hospitality), and food sharing among kinsmen within the household and village. …

Group-based trust and gender differences in China

Based on the established finding that there are gender differences in the type and use of social capital, we suggest that males and females also differ in the ways they engage in intra- and inter-group interactions. An experiment was conducted to explore how gender affects group-based trust in China. The results demonstrated that male participants were significantly more trusting of unknown partners than were female participants. In addition, we found that male participants’ high trust toward unknown partners had a strong relationship with expectation of reciprocity from their partners while female participants’ low trust toward unknown partners was associated with a strong fear of exploitation from their partners. These findings were examined in the context of a discussion of gender differences in social capital.

Self‐disclosure as a situated interactional practice

Self-disclosure has long been a site of research in clinical and social psychology, where it suffers the fate of many interactional phenomena. It is operationalized (typically, into a set of bald statements of varying intimacy), and measured as a dependent variable (subject to the operation of factors like the age or gender of the discloser, the degree of acquaintance with the disclosed-to recipient, the expectation of reciprocity and so on), or manipulated as a causative independent variable (which affects such things as the perception of the discloser, the effectiveness of therapy, and so on). This treatment of self-disclosure, embedded in a research culture of a-contextual, experimenter-defined phenomena, risks missing the point that in ordinary life, self-disclosure is a social performance which must be brought off in interaction, and has its interactional context and its interactional consequences. When we examine examples of such brought-off disclosures, we start to see patterns in their design as voluntary revelations of personal data, and patterns in their social function, which are invisible to the standard factors and measures paradigm of experimental social psychology.

The Prudent Village: Risk Pooling Institutions in Medieval English Agriculture

The prudent peasant mitigated the risk of crop failures by scattering his arable land throughout his village, Deirdre McCloskey argued, because alternative risksharing institutions did not exist. But, alternatives did exist, this essay concludes. Medieval English peasants formed two types of farmers' cooperatives. Fraternities protected members from the perils of everyday life. Customary poor laws redistributed resources towards villagers beset by bad luck. In both institutions, the expectation of reciprocation motivated farmers with surpluses to aid neighbors with shortages. Deirdre McCloskey's theory of the prudent peasant has three tenets.1 Scattering farm fields reduced the variance of crop yields and thus the risk of starvation. Scattering farm fields reduced average crop yields and thus peasants' incomes. Scattering farm fields was the only way in which medieval English peasants mitigated risk. Translating the tenets into terms of portfolio theory forms the foundation of McCloskey's model. The risk to each farmer as measured by the variance of total output was reduced by diversifying holdings among many small plots facing different weather, weed, water, rodent, insect, and soil conditions. If one plot did poorly and another did well, a farmer could still harvest enough grain to survive from all of his plots put together. However, diversification was expensive. Scattered holdings yielded 10 percent less grain than their consolidated counterparts. So, scattering entailed an exchange of return for risk. The prudent peasant chose to scatter his farm fields to protect himself and his family from idiosyncratic agricultural shocks because better alternatives did not exist. Peasants had no better

Asymmetrical warfare from the perspective of humanitarian law and humanitarian action

AbstractWarring parties are increasingly unequal and the principle of equality of arms does not apply to them. This asymmetry in warfare has many ramifications. The militarily weaker party is tempted to have recourse to unlawful methods of warfare in order to overcome the adversaries' strength. The expectation of reciprocity as a fundamental motivation for respecting the law is often illusory and replaced instead with perfidious behaviour; covert operations substitute for open battles, “special rules” are made for “special situations”. The fight against international terrorism seems to constitute the epitome of this kind of warfare. “Elementary considerations of humanity” as enshrined in article 3 common to the 1949 Geneva Conventions however constitute universally binding rules for all — even unequal and asymmetrical — parties to any situation of armed violence. Furthermore, attacks on humanitarian organizations have showed that humanitarian relief may be contrary to belligerents' interests, or, even worse, that attacks on humanitarian workers may be part of their agenda. Humanitarian actors must be aware of these facts and adapt their working methods so as to be able to continue to provide impartial assistance, based solely on the needs of the victims of armed violence.

Why should i share? examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice

Electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated discussion forums focused on problems of practice that enable individuals to exchange advice and ideas with others based on common interests. However, why individuals help strangers in these electronic networks is not well understood: there is no immediate benefit to the contributor, and free-riders are able to acquire the same knowledge as everyone else. To understand this paradox, we apply theories of collective action to examine how individual motivations and social capital influence knowledge contribution in electronic networks. This study reports on the activities of one electronic network supporting a professional legal association. Using archival, network, survey, and content analysis data, we empirically test a model of knowledge contribution. We find that people contribute their knowledge when they perceive that it enhances their professional reputations, when they have the experience to share, and when they are structurally embedded in the network. Surprisingly, contributions occur without regard to expectations of reciprocity from others or high levels of commitment to the network.

A social identity approach to trust: interpersonal perception, group membership and trusting behaviour

Trusting behaviour involves relinquishing control over outcomes valuable to the self. Previous research suggests that interpersonal perceptions of trustworthiness are closely related to this behaviour. The present research suggests that the more proximal determinant of trusting behaviour is the expectation that the other will reciprocate. Based on the Social Identity model of Deindividuation Effects (SIDE) model, reciprocity expectations may be created by interpersonal perceptions of trustworthiness or a shared group membership. To investigate this, group membership and individual identifiability were experimentally manipulated (N = 139): When individuals were not identifiable, trusting behaviour was based on expectations of reciprocity inferred from group membership, not on perceived trustworthiness. In contrast, personal identifiability fostered perceptions of trustworthiness for both in- and out-group members. In this case interpersonal trustworthiness enhanced expectations of reciprocity, which in turn increased trusting behaviour. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Why Should I Share? Examining Social Capital and Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice

Electronic networks of practice are computer-mediated discussion forums focused on problems of practice that enable individuals to exchange advice and ideas with others based on common interests. However, why individuals help strangers in these electronic networks is not well understood: there is no immediate benefit to the contributor, and free-riders are able to acquire the same knowledge as everyone else. To understand this paradox, we apply theories of collective action to examine how individual motivations and social capital influence knowledge contribution in electronic networks. This study reports on the activities of one electronic network supporting a professional legal association. Using archival, network, survey, and content analysis data, we empirically test a model of knowledge contribution. We find that people contribute their knowledge when they perceive that it enhances their professional reputations, when they have the experience to share, and when they are structurally embedded in the network. Surprisingly, contributions occur without regard to expectations of reciprocity from others or high levels of commitment to the network.

Cusp not crisis: “Changing to Deliver” Scottish Government

A modern democracy is being created in Scotland following the re‐establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 with new executive and scrutiny structures. This paper reports on early developments and the emergence of the Scottish Executive's organisational change programme – “Changing to Deliver” – as a response to the demands for public service reform and continuous service improvement. The paper outlines the contexts, theoretical framework, and early actions taken by the Executive to ground its work; examines the programme aims and the workstreams for change adopted as priorities for action; and reflects on more recent developments and the prospects for the success of the change programme. A key feature which characterises elected, government organisations is the relationship between elected people and senior unelected officials. The paper reports exploratory research investigating the expectations held by Cabinet Ministers of officials and the reciprocal expectations these senior civil servants have of Scottish Ministers.