Skeptical Reciprocity and Principled Defection

Cooperating with others often entails some sacrifice of one's own material interests. Many theories of reciprocity and cooperation thus assert a social-material tradeoff. In these theories, people reciprocate cooperation when they prioritize how they treat others and how others treat them. They do not reciprocate cooperation when they prioritize their own material well-being. We challenge this perspective by presenting and testing a game-theoretic model in which people frequently do not reciprocate cooperation precisely for social reasons. The model is attribution-based and taps people's skepticism about each other's motives. To illustrate, consider first-move cooperation in a sequential, one-shot prisoners' dilemma. This behavior could be attributed to kindness; the first-mover caring about the second-mover. But it could also be attributed to tactical self-interest; the first-mover attempting to elicit the second-mover's reciprocal cooperation because it is materially profitable. Individuals we term " skeptical reciprocators " do not reciprocate cooperation they attribute to tactics rather than kindness. Even when they prioritize social concerns, good treatment alone does not prompt their positive reciprocity. They ask why they received good treatment, and absent a strong signal of kindness, do not reciprocate. If skeptical reciprocity is prevalent, the fundamental impediment to mutual cooperation in sequential prisoners' dilemmas is not that non-cooperation is materially payoff dominant. It is that first-movers cannot prove their kindness. More generally, much non-cooperation may arise not because people are self-interested, but because they worry others are. Two experiments highlight an upside of skeptical reciprocity: when first-movers can convincingly signal kindness, reciprocity rates are extremely high.