Indirect reciprocity is a pervasive social norm that promotes human cooperation. Helping someone establishes a good reputation, increasing the probability of receiving help from others. Here we hypothesize that indirect reciprocity regulates not only cooperative behavior but also the exchange of opinions within a social group. In a novel interactive perceptual task (Experiment 1), we show that participants relied more on the judgments of an alleged human partner when a second alleged peer had been endorsing participants’ opinions. By doing so, participants did not take into account the reliability of their partners’ judgments and did not maximize behavioral accuracy and monetary reward. This effect declined when participants did not expect future interactions with their partners, suggesting the emergence of downstream mechanisms of reciprocity linked to the management of reputation. Importantly, all these effects disappeared when participants knew that the partners’ responses were computer-generated (Experiment 2). Our results suggest that, within a social group, individuals may weight others’ opinions through indirect reciprocity, highlighting the emergence of normative distortions in the process of information transmission among humans.

Human decisions are often influenced by others' opinions. This process is regulated by social norms: for instance, we tend to reciprocate the consideration received from others, independently of their reliability as information sources. Nonetheless, no study to date has investigated whether and how reciprocity modulates social influence in child–adult interaction. We tested 6-, 8- and 10-year-old children in a novel joint perceptual task. A child and an adult experimenter made perceptual estimates and then took turns in making a final decision, choosing between their own and partner's response. We manipulated the final choices of the adult partner, who in one condition chose often the child's estimates, whereas in another condition tended to confirm her own response. Results reveal that 10-year-old children reciprocated the consideration received from the partner, increasing their level of conformity to the adult's judgements when the partner had shown high consideration towards them. At the same time, 10-year-old children employed more elaborate decision criteria in choosing when trusting the adult partner compared to younger children and did not show egocentric biases in their final decisions. Our results shed light on the development of the cognitive and normative mechanisms modulating reciprocal social influence in child–adult interaction.

Summary Humans are constantly influenced by others’ behavior and opinions. Of importance, social influence among humans is shaped by reciprocity: we follow more the advice of someone who has been taking into consideration our opinions. In the current work, we investigate whether reciprocal social influence can emerge while interacting with a social humanoid robot. In a joint task, a human participant and a humanoid robot made perceptual estimates and then could overtly modify them after observing the partner’s judgment. Results show that endowing the robot with the ability to express and modulate its own level of susceptibility to the human’s judgments represented a double-edged sword. On the one hand, participants lost confidence in the robot’s competence when the robot was following their advice; on the other hand, participants were unwilling to disclose their lack of confidence to the susceptible robot, suggesting the emergence of reciprocal mechanisms of social influence supporting human-robot collaboration.

Taking advice from others requires confidence in their competence. This is important for interaction with peers, but also for collaboration with social robots and artificial agents. Nonetheless, we do not always have access to information about others’ competence or performance. In these uncertain environments, do our prior beliefs about the nature and the competence of our interacting partners modulate our willingness to rely on their judgments? In a joint perceptual decision making task, participants made perceptual judgments and observed the simulated estimates of either a human participant, a social humanoid robot or a computer. Then they could modify their estimates based on this feedback. Results show participants’ belief about the nature of their partner biased their compliance with its judgments: participants were more influenced by the social robot than human and computer partners. This difference emerged strongly at the very beginning of the task and decreased with repeated exposure to empirical feedback on the partner’s responses, disclosing the role of prior beliefs in social influence under uncertainty. Furthermore, the results of our functional task suggest an important difference between human–human and human–robot interaction in the absence of overt socially relevant signal from the partner: the former is modulated by social normative mechanisms, whereas the latter is guided by purely informational mechanisms linked to the perceived competence of the partner.

Human decisions are often influenced by other’s opinions. This process is regulated by social norms: for instance, we tend to reciprocate the consideration received from others, independently of their reliability as information sources. Nonetheless, no study to date has investigated whether and how reciprocity modulates social influence in child-adult interaction. We tested 6, 8 and 10 years old children in a novel interactive perceptual task. A child and an adult experimenter made perceptual estimates and then took turns in making a final decision, choosing between own and partner’s response. We manipulated the final choices of the adult’s partner, who in one condition chose often the child’s estimates, whereas in another condition tended to confirm her own response. Results reveal that 10 years old children indeed reciprocated the consideration received from the partner, increasing their level of conformity to the adult’s judgments when the partner had shown high consideration towards them. At the same time, 10 years old children employed more elaborate decision criteria in choosing when trusting the adult partner and did not show egocentric biases in their final decisions. Our results shed light on the development of the cognitive and normative mechanisms modulating reciprocal social influence in child-adult interaction.