Indirect Reciprocity Research Articles

When do stereotypes undermine indirect reciprocity?

Social reputations provide a powerful mechanism to stimulate human cooperation, but observing individual reputations can be cognitively costly. To ease this burden, people may rely on proxies such as stereotypes, or generalized reputations assigned to groups. Such stereotypes are less accurate than individual reputations, and so they could disrupt the positive feedback between altruistic behavior and social standing, undermining cooperation. How do stereotypes impact cooperation by indirect reciprocity? We develop a theoretical model of group-structured populations in which individuals are assigned either individual reputations based on their own actions or stereotyped reputations based on their groups' behavior. We find that using stereotypes can produce either more or less cooperation than using individual reputations, depending on how widely reputations are shared. Deleterious outcomes can arise when individuals adapt their propensity to stereotype. Stereotyping behavior can spread and can be difficult to displace, even when it compromises collective cooperation and even though it makes a population vulnerable to invasion by defectors. We discuss the implications of our results for the prevalence of stereotyping and for reputation-based cooperation in structured populations.

Keeping up with the times in Ireland: Older adults bridging the age-based digital divide together?

In 2021, data on Internet usage for those aged 75 years and older in Ireland indicated that almost half of this cohort (46%) had never accessed the Internet. This study examines the role of informal peer learning in the digital lives of older adults in Ireland. A mixed methods case study methodology was employed. Data were collected from 100 participants by means of an online survey, followed by interviews with 12 participants who opted in from the survey. Interview data were collected and analysed using a constructivist grounded theory approach. My findings indicate that questions surrounding digital technologies were best addressed on an individual level, often from a same generation peer, whether household member, family or other relative, friend or member of one’s social environment. There was evidence of indirect reciprocity from these learning exchanges to a participant’s peers. Research into peer learning in informal social and community environments for older adults has been scarcely addressed heretofore. This research highlights that it is here that much later-life learning relating to digital skills takes place. The principles of intergenerational learning: learning with one another, learning from one another, learning about one another, offer a useful lens for future consideration of informal peer learning related to digital skills development amongst older adults.

Helping those who help others: The roles of indirect reciprocity and relatedness

Abstract“Helping those who help others” appears to be a widespread phenomenon. It is typically framed as indirect reciprocity in which individuals who are seen to help later receive returns from third parties. Here, I propose that helping can also be explained by the benefits that result from helping related helpers (where relatedness means sharing genes more than average, whether due to genealogy or some other mechanism). I test the functional roles of relatedness (or “kin selection”) and of reciprocity in explaining helping by varying the population structure and the number of interactions in individual‐based simulations. First, with a unitary population in which individuals had a greater tendency to meet others of their own type, there were high levels of a discriminating strategy which helped other helpers. This can be explained by kin selection, in which helpers who help other helpers increase the payoff of their own strategy despite incurring a cost themselves. Introducing an “island population” structure reduced these indirect fitness benefits from helping, and this caused the frequency of the discriminating strategy to decrease markedly. Finally, increasing the number of interactions caused only a small increase in the level of the discriminating strategy (and thereby of helping helpers), consistent with indirect reciprocity (by means of the simplest strategy) being very weak. I argue that relatedness requires greater attention as an alternative to indirect reciprocity in explaining why individuals might help those who help others.

Emotional consequences of social debt sharing in communal relationships.

Whereas previous research has often struggled to disentangle the behavioral effects of gratitude and indebtedness felt in response to favors received by individuals, the present article clearly manifests their unique functions by investigating what happens if not just the individual but also their romantic partner is involved in a mutual exchange of favors. We propose that people in communal relationships share each other's social debt toward others that are not part of the dyad, and the emotion of indebtedness plays a vital role in that process. Three preregistered experiments revealed that people's emotions (gratitude and indebtedness) toward favors that their partners receive from others, or extend to them, are similar to when they receive or extend these favors themselves. Study 1 (N = 470) revealed that participants experienced vicarious gratitude and indebtedness to favors extended to their partners by others. Additional studies suggested that social debt between participants and third parties could be repaid by (Study 2; N = 507) and repaid to (Study 3; N = 304) their partners. These effects did not exist for exchanges in noncommunal relationships, indicating that these could not be simply attributed to indirect reciprocity. Rather, we believe that social debt sharing is a core feature of communal relationships in social exchange, and the emotion of indebtedness forms the psychological mechanism underlying this process. Crucially, indebtedness but not gratitude drove people's responses to shared debts, suggesting a unique function of indebtedness in mediating the social exchange of communal dyads. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Cooperation Dynamic through Individualistic Indirect Reciprocity Mechanism in a Multi-Dynamic Model

This research proposes a new variant of Nowak and Sigmund’s indirect reciprocity model focused on agents’ individualism, which means that an agent strengthens its profile to the extent to which it makes a profit; this is using agent-based modeling. In addition, our model includes environmentally related conditions such as visibility and cooperative demand and internal poses such as obstinacy. The simulation results show that cooperators appear in a more significant proportion with conditions of low reputation visibility and high cooperative demand. Still, severe defectors take advantage of this situation and exceed the cooperators’ ratio. Some events show a heterogeneous society only with conditions of high obstinacy and cooperative demand. In general, the simulations show diverse scenarios, including centralized, polarized, and mixed societies. Simulation results show no healthy cooperation in indirect reciprocity due to individualism.

A study of the influence of altruism, social responsibility, reciprocity, and the subjective norm on online prosocial behavior in adolescence

While the study of offline prosocial behavior has a long tradition, much less information is available about how these behaviors manifest and change in the digital environment, and little is known about their background. This paper evaluates differences by age and gender in a variety of attitudes and beliefs during adolescence and studies their influence on the online prosocial behavior emitted and received. A cross-sectional study was performed with 1299 participants aged between 14 and 20 from the Region of Madrid (Spain). The Spanish adaptation of the Online Prosocial Behavior Scale and a selection of items from various studies on attitudes and beliefs regarding altruism, direct and indirect reciprocity, social responsibility, and the perception of the subjective norm were administered. The results suggest that female adolescents maintain higher altruism, social responsibility, and indirect reciprocity than males, and that the older age group (18–20 years old) has higher scores in altruism, social responsibility, and direct reciprocity. Together with altruism, the subjective norm, social responsibility, and indirect reciprocity positively influence the online prosocial behavior emitted by adolescents. Indirect reciprocity, the subjective norm and altruism also influence the feeling of receiving online prosocial behaviors from others. Knowing the extent to which adolescents hold prosocial beliefs and which of these beliefs may favor prosocial online behaviors can be beneficial when promoting such beliefs and fostering more positive online conduct, as well as lessening cyberbullying, online hate and any other manifestation of aggressive behavior online.

Intention and upstream indirect reciprocity: Insights from behavioral and ERP evidence

Intention and upstream indirect reciprocity: Insights from behavioral and ERP evidence

Indirect reciprocity with abductive reasoning

Indirect reciprocity is a reputational mechanism through which cooperative behavior can be promoted amongst a group of individuals. However, in order for this mechanism to effectively do so, cheating must be appropriately punished and cooperating appropriately rewarded. Errors in assessments and actions can hinder this process. In such a setting, individuals might try to reason about evidence to assign reputations given the possibility of errors. Here, we consider a well-established theory of reasoning used to combine evidence, abductive reasoning, as a possible means by which such errors can be circumvented. Specifically, we use Dempster–Shafer theory to model individuals who account for possible errors by combining information about their beliefs about the status of the population and the errors rates and then choose the simplest scenario that could explain their observations in the context of these beliefs. We investigate the effectiveness of abductive reasoning at promoting cooperation for five social norms: Scoring, Shunning, Simple Standing, Staying, and Stern Judging. We find that, generally, abductive reasoning can outperform non-reasoning models at ameliorating the effects of the aforementioned challenges and promote higher levels of cooperation under low-error conditions. However, for high-error conditions, we find that abductive reasoning can undermine cooperation. Furthermore, we also find that a degree of bias towards believing previously held reputations can help sustain cooperation.

Enabling consumer reciprocity through voucher campaigns

PurposeThis study proposes that reciprocity appeal may influence consumers helping behavior. The authors suggest that this influence depends on the target of reciprocity (direct vs. indirect), consumer–brand social distance (close vs. distant) and frequency of exposure to the appeal over time.Design/methodology/approachThis research was conducted through three experimental studies. They were carried out both through online experiment (Study 1) and in laboratory (Studies 2 and 3). Study 3 consisted of an experiment combined with longitudinal growth models, supporting the hypothesis that repetitive periods decrease reciprocity over time.FindingsThe results demonstrate that consumers close to a brand become more prosocial toward the company when the reciprocity appeal is perceived as direct (vs. indirect). In contrast, the indirect reciprocity appeal influences consumers distant from the company. Furthermore, reciprocity appeal decreases consumer helping behavior over time, but indirect reciprocity appeal attenuates this negative effect only to close customers.Research limitations/implicationsThis research contributes to theory by showing that direct reciprocal appeals increase the helping behavior of close customers when company appeals are infrequently made.Originality/valueThis research is the first to empirically investigate the efficiency of voucher campaigns. Furthermore, it innovates by exploring a situation of direct consumer reciprocity in which the consumer decides to help a company with an expectation, but no explicit requirement, that the company will reciprocate.

Creating social value through operational supply chain transparency

AbstractWhether inclusive business (IB) supply chain transparency (SCT) can add value to a firm as an essential strategic resource is controversial. This study investigates how IB SCT affects willingness to pay a premium (WPP). Conditional process analysis was used to analyze survey data collected from 633 Chinese subjects in a scenario‐based role‐playing experiment. Analysis of the responses demonstrates that IB SCT indirectly enhances WPP through indirect reciprocity. In addition, the stronger the costly prosocial attributes of customers, the greater the indirect effect of IB SCT on WPP. The results indicate that IB SCT can add value to firms through consumer rewards, especially for costly prosocial consumers. These research constructs provide valuable insights for operators adopting IB to help them communicate and coordinate IB resources with consumers for IB sustainability.

Hotels re-explored: Experience and influence of reciprocity and social normative appeals

In this paper we report two high-powered and pre-registered experiments, testing the robustness and conceptual development of reciprocity and social norm appeals. Both experiments assessed both psychological processes for complying with these appeals and pro-environmental behavioral intention in tourism settings. In Experiment 1 (N = 2004), participants reported lower psychological reactance levels after learning that the hotel engaged in resource conservation (i.e., indirect homeomorphic reciprocity). No statistically significant effect was obtained for either obligatory motivation, prosocial motivation, skepticism, or behavioral intentions to reuse hotel towels. Importantly, high baseline intention of reusing hotel towels might have limited the effect of appeals. Therefore, we targeted meat consumption in Experiment 2 (n = 2540). Results first showed stronger obligatory and prosocial motivation for all three reciprocity appeals, compared to the standard appeal. No statistically significant results were found for either reactance or skepticism. Finally, after learning that the hotel had made a financial contribution to an environmental organization (i.e., indirect heteromorphic reciprocity) participants showed reduced meat consumption intentions compared to the standard appeal. Overall, the results provide initial evidence for conceptually refining the norm of reciprocity to encourage pro-environmental behaviors and for understanding the underlying psychological processes.

From the Perspective of Symbolic Interactionism -Understanding Reciprocal Relationships in Car Boot Markets

This research study explores the emergence and development of reciprocal relationships within the car boot market in Guangzhou. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Symbolic Interactionism, the motivation behind these relationships is examined. The study uses field research, including in-depth interviews and observations, to gather data on the motivations, interactions, and reciprocal exchanges among market participants. The research objectives include understanding the background and characteristics of the car boot market, exploring the establishment of reciprocal relationships from the perspective of Symbolic Interactionism, and investigating the implications of these relationships for social identities. The research methodology encompasses qualitative methods, such as participant observation and interviews, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the car boot market and its reciprocal dynamics. The research findings indicate that in the car boot market, reciprocal relationships are formed through the exchange of symbols and meaningful interactions among vendors and customers. These relationships contribute to the construction of social identities and foster economic development within the market. Through direct and indirect reciprocity, vendors build networks and expand their social identities beyond their existing relationships. The conclusions drawn from this study underscore the significance of interactional behaviors and symbolic exchanges in the car boot market. The research highlights the applicability of Symbolic Interactionism in analyzing and understanding the nuanced dynamics of reciprocal relationships within informal economies. It offers valuable insights for the development and management of the car boot market and recommends strategies for fostering and sustaining reciprocal relationships.

How altruistic is indirect reciprocity? — Evidence from gift-exchange games in the lab

Indirect reciprocity involves human cooperation, where one agent rewards or punishes another agent for behaving kindly or unkindly towards a third party. This paper analyzes the question of what drives indirect reciprocity: Does the agent reward or punish because she (altruistically) cares about the third party? Or does she take the other agent’s behavior as a signal of how the latter would treat her if they met? To measure the relative importance of the altruism motive versus the signaling motive, we offer a theoretical framework to analyze both motives for indirect reciprocity and run a series of three-player gift-exchange games: a manager pays wages to a worker, and a coworker, before the worker (but not the coworker) can reciprocate by choosing her effort. The coworker’s effort is exogenously given throughout the experiment. In three different treatments, we manipulate the worker’s information on wages. We find that, when only the coworker’s wage is observable, the worker’s effort increases with the coworker’s wage. In contrast, when the worker can observe her own wage, the coworker’s wage does not affect the worker’s effort. We interpret this as support for the signaling motive.

Golden gazes: Gaze direction and emotional context promote prosocial behavior by increasing attributions of empathy and perspective-taking.

Prosocial behavior is fundamental to societies. But when and toward whom do humans act generously? We investigate the impact of a listeners' gaze direction and the emotional context of the story heard on (a) perceptions of their social cognition skills and (b) prosocial decisions toward them. In three experiments (two preregistered, N = 486), human participants witnessed prerecorded video encounters between a listener (visible) and a speaker (audible, not visible). The listener either established eye contact, averted gaze, or showed a mixed gaze pattern (gaze direction), while the speaker told a neutral or negatively valenced autobiographic episode (emotional context). Participants rated the listeners' empathy and perspective-taking after each video and played the trust game (Study 1) or the dictator game (Study 2) with the listener. Replicating previous findings, occasional gaze avoidance, especially during negative narrations, increased attributions of social understanding to the listener. Critically, mediation analyses revealed that listeners perceived as empathic and taking perspective were ultimately treated with more trust and generosity in strategic and nonstrategic economic games, suggesting that social signals and contextual cues can serve as an indication of another's reputation, thereby promoting indirect reciprocity. Last, in Study 3, we show that emotional context, but not listeners' gaze behavior, promoted the spread of generosity toward anonymous, previously unobserved individuals in a dictator game, driven by social cognition skills attributed to the listener. We conclude that social signals and contextual cues can be important drivers of cooperation in societies via mechanisms such as indirect reciprocity and social contagion of generosity. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Polarize, catalyze, and stabilize: how a minority of norm internalizers amplify group selection and punishment

Many mechanisms behind the evolution of cooperation, such as reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, and altruistic punishment, require group knowledge of individual actions. But what keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Conformist norm internalization, the tendency to abide by the behavior of the majority of the group, even when it is individually harmful, could be the answer. In this paper, we analyze a world where (1) there is group selection and punishment by indirect reciprocity, but (2) many actions (half) go unobserved and therefore unpunished. Can norm internalization fill this “observation gap” and lead to high levels of cooperation, even when agents may in principle cooperate only when likely to be caught and punished? Specifically, we seek to understand whether adding norm internalization to the strategy space in a public goods game can lead to higher levels of cooperation when both norm internalization and cooperation start out rare. We found the answer to be positive, but, interestingly, not because norm internalizers end up making up a substantial fraction of the population, nor because they cooperate much more than other agent types. Instead, norm internalizers, by polarizing, catalyzing, and stabilizing cooperation, can increase levels of cooperation of other agent types, while only making up a minority of the population themselves.Significance statementWhat keeps people cooperating when no one is looking? Group selection favoring cooperative groups does not require observers, but often works best when there is some other norm enforcement mechanism to supplement it. But most norm enforcement mechanisms require observers in order to function. Here, we examine whether norm internalization could fill this enforcement gap, by acting as an “internal enforcer” of norms. Perhaps surprisingly, we discovered in our simulations that the population of norm internalizers always remained quite small, and norm internalizers did not necessarily cooperate more than other agent types. Nevertheless, under certain conditions, they were able to spark significantly higher mean levels of cooperation, by causing other agents to cooperate more—partly by setting off bouts of high cooperation after periods of very low cooperation, and partly by helping maintain those bouts of high cooperation for longer.

It’s my turn: empirical evidence of upstream indirect reciprocity in society through a quasi-experimental approach

This study estimated the effect of receiving help during a disaster on an individual’s subsequent cooperation for a common-pool resource. Such a chain of altruism is called generalized exchange and upstream indirect reciprocity in exchange and cooperation theories. Theoretical studies have pointed out its importance in understanding human cooperation in society. Some researchers on disaster have observed the phenomenon called “disaster area relay”, where disaster victims, having received help during the disaster they experienced, in turn, help victims of another subsequent disaster. However, there are few empirical and systematic analyses of this in actual societal events due to the causal problem. This paper attempted to overcome this problem through a quasi-experimental approach using big data. This paper focused on mutual cooperation through “Free Tank”, which is a common-pool resource in the online community called “mineo-KINGDOM”. The result of difference-in-differences estimation showed that receiving help during a disaster had a positive causal impact on subsequent cooperation for a common-pool resource and reciprocity norm. This result provides assurance that helping has a potential ripple effect on individuals’ cooperation.

Evolutionary dynamics of friendship-driven reputation strategies

Indirect reciprocity refers to a cooperative mechanism in which individuals evaluate each other’s reputation and take corresponding action. It is predicated on the idea that community members frequently discuss their opinions with each other and utilize the information to determine who deserves to cooperate with. When information is disseminated publicly, all community members are able to communicate on how each other has performed in the past. We combine balanced structural relationships in social networks with reputation strategies and find that friendship-driven reputation strategies can maintain cooperation and resist the invasion of defectors. Under the condition of rare mutations, several individual decision reputation strategies based on the partners’ evaluation can enjoy higher abundances in evolutionary races. In competition with ALLD, the strategy that rely on the negative partners’ opinions is outcompeted by ALLC. The reputation strategy based on the positive partners’ opinions always maintains a very high level of cooperation even for frequent mutations. We also find that in a heterogeneous population consisting of unconditional strategies and one of the reputation strategies, a chain reaction of defection occurs. Our results highlight the significant roles of friendship-driven reputation strategies in promoting cooperation when it is challenging for individuals to observe each other’s behavior but easy for them to share information on interacting experiences of third-party members.

Reputation and reciprocity.

Reputation and reciprocity are key mechanisms for cooperation in human societies, often going hand in hand to favor prosocial behavior over selfish actions. Here we review recent researches at the interface of physics and evolutionary game theory that explored these two mechanisms. We focus on image scoring as the bearer of reputation, as well as on various types of reciprocity, including direct, indirect, and network reciprocity. We review different definitions of reputation and reciprocity dynamics, and we show how these affect the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas. We consider first-order, second-order, as well as higher-order models in well-mixed and structured populations, and we review experimental works that support and inform the results of mathematical modeling and simulations. We also provide a synthesis of the reviewed researches along with an outlook in terms of six directions that seem particularly promising to explore in the future.

Trust based attachment.

In social systems subject to indirect reciprocity, a positive reputation is key for increasing one's likelihood of future positive interactions [1-13]. The flow of gossip can amplify the impact of a person's actions on their reputation depending on how widely it spreads across the social network, which leads to a percolation problem [14]. To quantify this notion, we calculate the expected number of individuals, the "audience", who find out about a particular interaction. For a potential donor, a larger audience constitutes higher reputational stakes, and thus a higher incentive, to perform "good" actions in line with current social norms [7, 15]. For a receiver, a larger audience therefore increases the trust that the partner will be cooperative. This idea can be used for an algorithm that generates social networks, which we call trust based attachment (TBA). TBA produces graphs that share crucial quantitative properties with real-world networks, such as high clustering, small-world behavior, and powerlaw degree distributions [16-21]. We also show that TBA can be approximated by simple friend-of-friend routines based on triadic closure, which are known to be highly effective at generating realistic social network structures [19, 22-25]. Therefore, our work provides a new justification for triadic closure in social contexts based on notions of trust, gossip, and social information spread. These factors are thus identified as potential significant influences on how humans form social ties.

Teaching Social Dilemma through Simulating Cooperation: A Classroom Experiment

Despite an increased number of case studies simulating social problems in the classroom, due attention has been rarely paid to social dilemma games in light of teaching the key concepts of sociology. We propose a paper-and-pencil experiment designed for sizeable students to simultaneously explore various conditions of sustainable cooperation in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, with five steps of in-class activities presented in details. We evaluate experimental results quantitatively and the usefulness of game-based learning on the basis of debriefing interviews. Beside positive effects of repeated dyadic interaction and direct communications on cooperation, it is shown that sharing a common goal with group members in the presence of intergroup competition tends to strengthen reputation-based indirect reciprocity. Students seem to learn more deeply and see wider relevance as a product of engaging in the experiment, generating findings from the simulated data, and associating them with real-world examples of reciprocity. Our case study on teaching social dilemma through a simple but novel classroom experiment may provide valuable information to educators and practitioners interested in the effective use of economic games as an interactive teaching method for undergraduates in the setting of higher education.