Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Jordan, Jillian J.
• Hoffman, Moshe
• Nowak, Martin A.
• Rand, David G.

Titel

Uncalculating cooperation is used to signal trustworthiness

Ist Teil von

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 2016-08, Vol.113 (31), p.8658-8663

Ort / Verlag

United States: National Academy of Sciences

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.