Preferential interactions promote blind cooperation and informed defection

Abstract

It is common sense that costs and benefits should be carefully weighed before deciding on a course of action. However, we often disapprove of people who do so, even when their actual decision benefits us. For example, we prefer people who directly agree to do us a favor over those who agree only after securing enough information to ensure that the favor will not be too costly. Why should we care about how people make their decisions, rather than just focus on the decisions themselves? Current models show that punishment of information gathering can be beneficial because it forces blind decisions, which under some circumstances enhances cooperation. Here we show that aversion to information gathering can be beneficial even in the absence of punishment, due to a different mechanism: preferential interactions with reliable partners. In a diverse population where different people have different-and unknown-preferences, those who seek additional information before agreeing to cooperate reveal that their preferences are close to the point where they would choose not to cooperate. Blind cooperators are therefore more likely to keep cooperating even if conditions change, and aversion to information gathering helps to interact preferentially with them. Conversely, blind defectors are more likely to keep defecting in the future, leading to a preference for informed defectors over blind ones. Both mechanisms-punishment to force blind decisions and preferential interactions-give qualitatively different predictions, which may enable experimental tests to disentangle them in realworld situations.cooperation | signaling | population heterogeneity | game theory | incomplete information W hy didn't you ask before? This question too often lacks a reasonable answer. Consider the case of Alice who, learning that her friend Bob was visiting her city, rushed to invite him to stay at her place-only to find, once the offer had been gratefully accepted, that Bob would occupy her living room for a whole month. Most people would agree: Alice should have asked before.However, Alice's behavior is not uncommon. We often refrain from gathering information about the costs and benefits of our interactions with others, and often with good reason: When the situation is reversed, we prefer people who directly agree to do us a favor over those who only agree after carefully weighing costs and benefits. Why do we have this preference? If someone agrees to do us a favor-or to cooperate with us in any other way-why should we care about how they made their decision?Intuitively, aversion to information gathering can be beneficial because it makes us prefer people who are more likely to cooperate. In addition, people who would in principle want to gather information may be inhibited by others' aversion to it. To illustrate these two mechanisms, let us first consider a simple scenario in which two types of people exist: unreliable and reliable. Unreliable types only cooperate in a limited set of conditions and need to gather additional information to deci...

The Cost of Appearing Suspicious? Information Gathering in Trust Decisions

“…Information gathering can reveal the investors' covert intentions that govern the cooperative decision-making process. For example, it has been proposed that some individuals care about whether their cooperation partner gathers information about their own profit if they were to defect, before making a cooperative decision that is mutually beneficial 16,17,21 . Under that assumption, simulations of cooperative games show that blind cooperation becomes a beneficial strategy 16,17,21 .…”

“…For example, it has been proposed that some individuals care about whether their cooperation partner gathers information about their own profit if they were to defect, before making a cooperative decision that is mutually beneficial 16,17,21 . Under that assumption, simulations of cooperative games show that blind cooperation becomes a beneficial strategy 16,17,21 . For example, when individuals compete to become cooperative partners in heterogeneous populations with both reliable and unreliable individuals, those individuals who blindly cooperate should be preferred 21 .…”

“…Under that assumption, simulations of cooperative games show that blind cooperation becomes a beneficial strategy 16,17,21 . For example, when individuals compete to become cooperative partners in heterogeneous populations with both reliable and unreliable individuals, those individuals who blindly cooperate should be preferred 21 . The assumption of these simulations is corroborated by behavioural experiments showing that people who gather information about their own profit are perceived as more selfish, and indeed also tend to behave more selfishly 5 .…”

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