Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation: cross-checking and social bonding

Self Cite

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’.

Section: (V) Conditionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The benefits of being seen to help others: indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner choice

Roberts

Raihani

Bshary

et al. 2021

Self Cite

“…The way in which gossip was reported was also different between cooperators and defectors who preferred to pass information as coming from someone else as a way of distancing from the source and thus avoid retaliation. Samu & Takács [103] studied cooperative behaviour in a laboratory experiment where subjects played two-person Prisoner's Dilemma games with varying interaction partners and were allowed to gossip about their experiences. They investigated the role of two mechanisms that could support the honesty and credibility of gossip: they tested how cross-checking the validity of third-party information and allowing for social bonding between the sender and the receiver affected the reliability of reputations, and ultimately cooperation.…”

Section: This Issue's Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling

Számadó¹,

Balliet

Giardini

et al. 2021

Self Cite

Large-scale non-kin cooperation is a unique ingredient of human success. This type of cooperation is challenging to explain in a world of self-interested individuals. There is overwhelming empirical evidence from different disciplines that reputation and gossip promote cooperation in humans in different contexts. Despite decades of research, important details of reputation systems are still unclear. Our goal with this theme issue is to promote an interdisciplinary approach that allows us to explore and understand the evolution and maintenance of reputation systems with a special emphasis on gossip and honest signalling. The theme issue is organized around four main questions: What are the necessary conditions for reputation-based systems? What is the content and context of reputation systems? How can reputations promote cooperation? And, what is the role of gossip in maintaining reputation systems and thus cooperation? This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.

“…Besides punishment, the other key mechanism in sustaining cooperation towards collective action is reputation [31][32][33][34]. Adopting a loose definition, reputation emerges when an individual's actions can be directly or indirectly observed by his peers and used to condition their own behaviours when playing with him.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reputation and punishment sustain cooperation in the optional public goods game

Podder

Righi

Pancotto

2021

Cooperative behaviour has been extensively studied as a choice between cooperation and defection. However, the possibility to not participate is also frequently available. This type of problem can be studied through the optional public goods game. The introduction of the ‘Loner’ strategy' allows players to withdraw from the game, which leads to a cooperator–defector–loner cycle. While pro-social punishment can help increase cooperation, anti-social punishment—where defectors punish cooperators—causes its downfall in both experimental and theoretical studies. In this paper, we introduce social norms that allow agents to condition their behaviour to the reputation of their peers. We benchmark this with respect both to the standard optional public goods game and to the variant where all types of punishment are allowed. We find that a social norm imposing a more moderate reputational penalty for opting out than for defecting increases cooperation. When, besides reputation, punishment is also possible, the two mechanisms work synergically under all social norms that do not assign to loners a strictly worse reputation than to defectors. Under this latter set-up, the high levels of cooperation are sustained by conditional strategies, which largely reduce the use of pro-social punishment and almost completely eliminate anti-social punishment. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling’.