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Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.

ABSTRACT: Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an answer: people cooperate in an uncalculating way to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decision-making is operationalized by either a subject's choice of whether to reveal the precise costs of cooperating (Exp. 1) or the time a subject spends considering these costs (Exp. 2). In both experiments, we find that participants are more likely to engage in uncalculating cooperation when their decision-making process is observable to others. Furthermore, we confirm that people who engage in uncalculating cooperation are perceived as, and actually are, more trustworthy than people who cooperate in a calculating way. Taken together, these data provide the first empirical evidence, to our knowledge, that uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness, and is not merely an efficient decision-making strategy that reduces cognitive costs. Our results thus help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors, such as extreme altruism, the use of ethical principles, and romantic love.

SUBMITTER: Jordan JJ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4978259 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.

Jordan Jillian J JJ Hoffman Moshe M Nowak Martin A MA Rand David G DG

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20160720 31

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we present experimental evidence that reputation concerns provide an answer: people cooperate in an uncalculating way to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decision-making is operationalized by either a subject' ...[more]

PMID: 27439873

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Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.

Publications

Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness.

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