Explicit person memories constrain the indirect reciprocation of prosocial acts

Wilkowski, Benjamin M.; Chai, Christopher A.

doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2012.04.005

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 71 publications

(135 reference statements)

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“…As such the likelihood of knowing someone's reputation may be insufficiently high for indirect reciprocity to serve as an effective mechanism to foster and maintain cooperation and coordination in very large groups [32]. In addition, it has been argued that there are mental constraints preventing people to keep track of the reputation of a large number of people at the same time [13,33]. Hence, other mechanisms such as proscriptive norms, institutions, and formal sanctions [34,35] may be necessary for people to work effectively together toward the accomplishment of their goals in macrodeme configurations.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

The prevalence of dyads in social life

et al. 2020

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A salient objective feature of the social environment in which people find themselves is group size. Knowledge of group size is highly relevant to behavioural scientists given that humans spend considerable time in social settings and the number of others influences much of human behaviour. What size of group do people actually look for and encounter in everyday life? Here we report four survey studies and one experience-sampling study (total N = 4,398) which provide evidence for the predominance of the dyad in daily life. Relative to larger group sizes, dyads are most common across a wide range of activities (e.g., conversations, projects, holidays, movies, sports, bars) obtained from three time moments (past activities, present, and future activities), sampling both mixed-sex and same-sex groups, with three different methodological approaches (retrospective reports, real-time data capture, and preference measures) in the United States and the Netherlands. We offer four mechanisms that may help explain this finding: reciprocity, coordination, social exclusion, and reproduction. The present findings advance our understanding of how individuals organize themselves in everyday life.

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Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

The prevalence of dyads in social life

et al. 2020

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“…Nevertheless, this effect must eventually tail off in large groups. Moreover, as well as there needing to be a chain of individuals to pass along information, psychology experiments also suggest that knowledge of reputation, by either observation or communication, requires explicit person memories (Wilkowski & Chai, 2012). This implies that, as with direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity is also constrained by memory size in large groups.…”

Section: (3) Indirect Reciprocitymentioning

confidence: 99%

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

Powers

Lehmann

2016

Biological Reviews

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Understanding the evolution of sociality in humans and other species requires understanding how selection on social behaviour varies with group size. However, the effects of group size are frequently obscured in the theoretical literature, which often makes assumptions that are at odds with empirical findings. In particular, mechanisms are suggested as supporting large-scale cooperation when they would in fact rapidly become ineffective with increasing group size. Here we review the literature on the evolution of helping behaviours (cooperation and altruism), and frame it using a simple synthetic model that allows us to delineate how the three main components of the selection pressure on helping must vary with increasing group size. The first component is the marginal benefit of helping to group members, which determines both direct fitness benefits to the actor and indirect fitness benefits to recipients. While this is often assumed to be independent of group size, marginal benefits are in practice likely to be maximal at intermediate group sizes for many types of collective action problems, and will eventually become very small in large groups due to the law of decreasing marginal returns. The second component is the response of social partners on the past play of an actor, which underlies conditional behaviour under repeated social interactions. We argue that under realistic conditions on the transmission of information in a population, this response on past play decreases rapidly with increasing group size so that reciprocity alone (whether direct, indirect, or generalised) cannot sustain cooperation in very large groups. The final component is the relatedness between actor and recipient, which, according to the rules of inheritance, again decreases rapidly with increasing group size. These results explain why helping behaviours in very large social groups are limited to cases where the number of reproducing individuals is small, as in social insects, or where there are social institutions that can promote (possibly through sanctioning) large-scale cooperation, as in human societies. Finally, we discuss how individually devised institutions can foster the transition from small-scale to large-scale cooperative groups in human evolution.

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“…For example, they manage their reputation by behaving generously in front of observers ( Milinski et al, 2002 ; Van Vugt and Hardy, 2010 ; Kanazawa and Fontaine, 2013 ), because a good reputation can provide priority for future cooperation with others ( Nowak and Sigmund, 2005 ). In addition, adults share more to elicit direct reciprocity, a form of interaction in which individuals do the same thing toward their partner as what their partner did to them ( Wilkowski and Chai, 2012 ). That is, adults are more generous toward a potential direct reciprocator in order to get payback from him/her subsequently ( Cox, 2004 ; Stanca et al, 2009 ; Kamas and Preston, 2012 ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Five-Year-Old Preschoolers’ Sharing is Influenced by Anticipated Reciprocation

Mingrui

Shi

et al. 2016

Front. Psychol.

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Whether children share in anticipation of future benefits returned by a partner is an interesting question. In this study, 5-year-old children and an adult partner played a sharing game, in which children donated first and the partner donated afterward. In Experiment 1, the partner’s resources were more attractive than the child’s. In the reciprocal condition, the child was told that s/he would be a recipient when the partner played as a donor. In the non-reciprocal condition, however, the child was told that an anonymous child would be the recipient when the partner donated. Results showed that children shared more with the partner when they knew that they would be a recipient later. In Experiment 2, the child was always the recipient when the partner donated, but the partner’s resources were more desirable than the child’s in the high-value condition, and less desirable in the low-value condition. We found that children were more generous when the partner’s resources were valued higher. These findings demonstrate that 5-year-old preschoolers’ sharing choices take into account the anticipated reciprocity of the recipient, suggesting either self-interested tactical sharing or direct reciprocity in advance of receiving. Specifically, they adjust their sharing behavior depending on whether a partner has the potential to reciprocate, and whether it is worth sharing relative to the value of the payback.

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Explicit person memories constrain the indirect reciprocation of prosocial acts

Cited by 5 publications

References 71 publications

The prevalence of dyads in social life

The prevalence of dyads in social life

When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours

Five-Year-Old Preschoolers’ Sharing is Influenced by Anticipated Reciprocation

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