Gossip, the exchange of information about absent others, is ingrained in the system of indirect reciprocity, in which participating members selectively interact and cooperate with others with a good ...reputation. Previous psychological theorizing suggests that indirect reciprocity is perceived to be bounded by group membership. We aimed to examine whether the group-bounded indirect reciprocity perspective explains intergroup gossip. We thus explored how group membership shapes the expectations about how gossip is used and willingness to gossip within and across group boundaries. We conducted three studies (total N = 986) and re-analyzed a published dataset (N = 690) and comprehensively investigated how willing people expect others to be to engage in within- and between-group gossip as well as how willing they themselves are to engage in both types of gossip, in minimal and university contexts. We found that consistent with the group-bounded indirect reciprocity perspective, people expected within group gossip to be more likely than intergroup gossip. In addition, in the minimal group context, we found that people were, in general, more willing to gossip towards in-group members rather than out-group members. However, in the university context, they were more willing to gossip about in-group and out-group members towards out-group and in-group members, respectively, suggesting that people may utilize intergroup gossip for strategic reasons. Our research was the first to experimentally elucidate the role of group membership in shaping expectations about gossip and willingness to gossip, and offers a promising starting point for future work on intergroup gossip and indirect reciprocity.
Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism for cooperation based on shared moral systems and individual reputations. It assumes that members of a community routinely observe and assess each other and that ...they use this information to decide who is good or bad, and who deserves cooperation. When information is transmitted publicly, such that all community members agree on each other’s reputation, previous research has highlighted eight crucial moral systems. These “leading-eight” strategies can maintain cooperation and resist invasion by defectors. However, in real populations individuals often hold their own private views of others. Once two individuals disagree about their opinion of some third party, they may also see its subsequent actions in a different light. Their opinions may further diverge over time. Herein, we explore indirect reciprocity when information transmission is private and noisy. We find that in the presence of perception errors, most leading-eight strategies cease to be stable. Even if a leading-eight strategy evolves, cooperation rates may drop considerably when errors are common. Our research highlights the role of reliable information and synchronized reputations to maintain stable moral systems.
Theoretical models suggest that gratitude is linked to increased prosociality. To date, however, there is a lack of a comprehensive quantitative synthesis of results to support this claim. In this ...review we aimed to (a) examine the overall strength of the association between gratitude and prosociality, and (b) identify the theoretical and methodological variables that moderate this link. We identified 252 effect sizes from 91 studies across 65 papers- (Total N = 18,342 participants). The present meta-analysis revealed a statistically significant, and moderate positive correlation between gratitude and prosociality (r = .374). This association was significantly larger among studies that assessed reciprocal outcomes relative to nonreciprocal outcomes, and in particular among studies that examined direct-compared with indirect-reciprocity. Studies that examined gratitude as an affective state reported significantly larger effect size studies assessing gratitude as a trait. Studies that examined benefit-triggered gratitude (in response to other's kindness) had a stronger effect that generalized gratitude that focuses on the appreciation of what is valued and cherished in life. Finally, studies that manipulated gratitude in vivo (e.g., economic games) had larger effect sizes compared with those based on recalled incidents when the person felt grateful. We describe the theoretical and practical significance of the results.
Indirect reciprocity is an important mechanism for promoting cooperation among self-interested agents. Simplified, it means “you help me; therefore somebody else will help you” (in contrast to direct ...reciprocity: “you help me; therefore I will help you”). Indirect reciprocity can be achieved via reputation and norms. Strategies, such as the so-called leading eight, relying on these principles can maintain high levels of cooperation and remain stable against invasion, even in the presence of errors. However, this is only the case if the reputation of an agent is modeled as a shared public opinion. If agents have private opinions and hence can disagree as to whether somebody is good or bad, even rare errors can cause cooperation to break apart. We show that most strategies can overcome the private assessment problem by applying pleasing. A pleasing agent acts in accordance with others' expectations of their behaviour (i.e., pleasing them) instead of being guided by their own, private assessment. As such, a pleasing agent can achieve a better reputation than previously considered strategies when there is disagreement in the population. Pleasing is effective even if the opinions of only a few other individuals are considered and when it bears additional costs. Finally, through a more exhaustive analysis of the parameter space than previous studies, we show that some of the leading eight still function under private assessment, i.e., that cooperation rates are well above an objective baseline. Yet, pleasing strategies supersede formerly described ones and enhance cooperation.
Social scientists often study the flow of material and social support as generalized exchange systems. These systems are associated with an array of benefits to groups and communities, but their ...existence is problematic, because individuals may be motivated to take from the system without giving back to it. Researchers have identified two broad processes governing prosociality in generalized exchange systems: generalized reciprocity (a person who receives help from someone pays it forward by helping a third person) and indirect reciprocity (a person who helps another establishes a prosocial reputation and, as a consequence, later receives help from a third person). Although generalized exchange systems can be based on either process, generalized and indirect reciprocity are based on different mechanisms and, with few exceptions, have been investigated independently. Here we present an integrated approach to generalized exchange that (1) specifies when each process is most likely to promote prosocial behavior, (2) details the implications for resource inequalities in generalized exchange systems, and (3) describes how generalized and indirect reciprocity jointly influence prosocial behavior. Results from four new experiments strongly support the theoretical arguments.
•Indirect cronyism is a phenomenon in which managers showing favoritism to subordinates based on their guanxi with a third party (e.g., another manager) rather than on their own merit, and is ...prevalent in Chinese organizations.•Manager’s particularism orientation and the third party’s hierarchical position exacerbate indirect cronyism.•Indirect reciprocity logic of fulfilling obligation to favor an in-group member and strengthening guanxi with the third party is the primary motive for managers’ indirect cronyism.•Indirect cronyism results in other members’ negative reactions such as low justice perception of the work unit, low trust toward the manager, and weak intention for a long-term relationship with the manager.
In this paper, we conceptualize indirect cronyism as a phenomenon in which managers show favoritism to indirect guanxihu subordinates who have informal, particular, and personal connections with a third party (e.g., another manager) and demonstrate its prevalent existence in Chinese organizations. We further explore crucial factors (i.e., the manager’s particularism orientation and the third party’s hierarchical position in the organization) that may play a role in whether managers engage in indirect cronyism and downstream consequences on other members of the organization. We draw on the indirect reciprocity logic embedded in social exchange theory to predict two underlying motives to explain why managers engage in indirect cronyism: (a) fulfilling their felt obligation to favor the indirect guanxihu subordinate and (b) strengthening their own guanxi with the third party. Results from three scenario-based experiments and one field study sampling a total of 1,559 working adults provide consistent support for our theoretical reasoning and hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical contributions this paper makes to advance the guanxi and cronyism literatures, as well as the practical implications of our findings for Chinese organizations and beyond.
Bounded generalized reciprocity (BGR) predicts that people cooperate to maintain a positive reputation with ingroup, but not outgroup, members—and this explains ingroup favoritism in cooperation. We ...propose that the benefits of maintaining a positive reputation are not limited by group boundaries and so people may cooperate to maintain a good reputation among outgroup members when they will meet and interact with members of that group again. According to this unbounded indirect reciprocity perspective, reputation can promote cooperation with both ingroup and outgroup members. Alternatively, social identity theory (SIT) favors social identity versus reputation as an explanation for cooperation among ingroup members. We test these hypotheses across five studies (Ns=619, 607, 613, 360, and 615) that manipulate reputation, social identification, and partner's group membership in a cooperative decision making task. Across our studies, people were more cooperative with both ingroup and outgroup members when their reputation was at stake (Studies 1–5), and reputational concern mediated the effect of cues of gossip on cooperation in interactions with ingroup and outgroup members (Studies 1–4). Social identification did not affect cooperation with ingroup members. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the indirect benefits of cooperation that can transcend group boundaries.
•Reputational concern is not restricted to interacting with ingroup members, but can also promote cooperation with outgroup members•Social identification did not affect cooperation with ingroup members•Reputational concern is a psychological mechanism operating also with outgroup members
When one individual helps another, it benefits the recipient and may also gain a reputation for being cooperative. This may induce others to favour the helper in subsequent interactions, so investing ...in being seen to help others may be adaptive. The best-known mechanism for this is indirect reciprocity (IR), in which the profit comes from an observer who pays a cost to benefit the original helper. IR has attracted considerable theoretical and empirical interest, but it is not the only way in which cooperative reputations can bring benefits. Signalling theory proposes that paying a cost to benefit others is a strategic investment which benefits the signaller through changing receiver behaviour, in particular by being more likely to choose the signaller as a partner. This reputation-based partner choice can result in competitive helping whereby those who help are favoured as partners. These theories have been confused in the literature. We therefore set out the assumptions, the mechanisms and the predictions of each theory for how developing a cooperative reputation can be adaptive. The benefits of being seen to be cooperative may have been a major driver of sociality, especially in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
Reciprocity in informal helping, or informal volunteering, is often seen as a way to ensure that people who are not altruistically motivated exchange help. Yet, it could be problematic for those who ...are unable to help, as they would be excluded from this exchange. We study to what extent people’s reciprocity expectations affect informal helping intentions and whether necessity of helping and perceived helpfulness (indirect reciprocity) compensate and moderate this relationship. Expectations are tested with a factorial survey conducted among the Longitudinal Internet studies for the Social Sciences panel ( N vignettes = 3,299). Multilevel regression analyses show that people have stronger intentions to help those who are likely to reciprocate but that a strong need for help and having helped others in the past are more important reasons to help. Furthermore, the effect of likelihood of reciprocity on informal helping intentions is stronger for neighbors who never helped others. Policy implications of these results are discussed.
At present, the reputation evaluation problem caused by resource constraints significantly influences group cooperation behavior, and cannot be considered and solved in the traditional game model. In ...this paper, we consider the evolutionary behavior of a spatial public goods game with constraints on second-order reputation evaluation, which can be characterized by an evaluation variable. First, to achieve constraints on high-reputation individuals, an adaptive threshold adjustment function is introduced to dynamically regulate the individual's image, which is based on the evaluation variable. We discuss the impact of evaluation constraints on group evolutionary behavior under four classical second-order updating rules: shunning, stern judging, simple standing, and image scoring. For shunning and stern judging, the appropriate evaluation constraint maximizes the cooperation level; for the other rules, high cooperative behavior is promoted by a small constraint value. Finally, we also analyze the evolutionary behavior of some mechanisms in two other networks: random and small-world networks. In summary, the current results provide an opportunity to study the evolution of human behavior in a competitive situation and develop an effective mechanism to foster collective cooperation.
•The behaviors of spatial PGG with constrained resources are discussed under different second order reputation rules.•For shunning and stern judging, there is a marginal constraint value that renders the cooperation level to be maximized.•For simple standing and image scoring, the cooperative behavior will be increased along with the constraint value.•The evolutionary behaviors on other two networks are investigated to verify the robustness of proposed method.
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