Personal experience and reputation interact in human decisions to help reciprocally

Abstract

There is ample evidence that human cooperative behaviour towards other individuals is often conditioned on information about previous interactions. This information derives both from personal experience (direct reciprocity) and from experience of others (i.e. reputation; indirect reciprocity). Direct and indirect reciprocity have been studied separately, but humans often have access to both types of information. Here, we experimentally investigate information use in a repeated helping game. When acting as donor, subjects can condition their decisions to help recipients with both types of information at a small cost to access such information. We find that information from direct interactions weighs more heavily in decisions to help, and participants tend to react less forgivingly to negative personal experience than to negative reputation. Moreover, effects of personal experience and reputation interact in decisions to help. If a recipient's reputation is positive, the personal experience of the donor has a weak effect on the decision to help, and vice versa. Yet if the two types of information indicate conflicting signatures of helpfulness, most decisions to help follow personal experience. To understand the roles of direct and indirect reciprocity in human cooperation, they should be studied in concert, not in isolation.

Self-organized flexible leadership promotes collective intelligence in human groups

“…Such competition could be easily incorporated by speed-dependent rewards to investigate the consequences for the collective dynamics [ 58 ]. Also, while we used an anonymous way of exchanging information, in many situations factors like personal experience or reputation of interaction partners might alter information use [ 59 , 60 ]. Finally, in earlier work we showed that presenting all decisions of polling 1 simultaneously also improves decision accuracy [ 14 , 61 ].…”

Reputation Management in Children on the Autism Spectrum

“…Reciprocity is a behavioural response contingent on another’s actions (Falk and Fischbacher 2006). Typical individuals highly value reciprocity (Kahneman 2003), with those who are more reciprocal seen as more cooperative and with a better reputation (Hoffman et al 1998; Milinski et al 2002; Molleman et al 2013; Nowak et al 2005). Understanding the principles of reciprocity and having expectations that others will reciprocate with you could underlie the ability to manage reputation.…”

Exposure to superfluous information reduces cooperation and increases antisocial punishment in reputation-based interactions

“…The image score we provided on screen would not be differently affected by these situations, as in the original models that were tested. Moreover, it is possible that humans value more recent decisions differently to earlier ones, or that they search for behavioral patterns (e.g., analogously to the algorithm suggested by Hauert and Stenull, 2002), or that they value a given image score not against zero but against a group mean that changes over time (as for example suggested by Milinski, 2000 andMolleman et al, 2013). The information we provided on screen would not be sufficient to play such sophisticated strategies.…”