Original Articles
Concerns about reputation via gossip promote generous allocations in an economic game

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2007.12.002Get rights and content

Abstract

In the present study, a modified dictator game was used to test the hypothesis that the threat of gossip would encourage prosocial decision making. All participants were asked to distribute an endowment between themselves and an anonymous second party. Half of the participants were told that the second party would be discussing their economic decision with a third party. For some participants, this third party was someone to whom they had first disclosed personally identifying information. Participants who received the threat of gossip manipulation were more generous than control participants, but only when the third party could personally identify them was this difference significant. These data reveal that at least some prosocial decisions are motivated by actor's reputational concerns—concerns that are directly mediated by language.

Introduction

Language may have served as a source of adaptive problems for our ancestors (Bering & Shackelford, 2004). These problems concerned successfully managing the social transmission of certain categories of information that, if made public, would have had consequences for the individual's reproductive success. Examples include information (whether deceptive or veridical) concerning changes to one's social status (e.g., reports of disputes with important allies), health (e.g., that one has a communicable disease), reproductive value (e.g., sexual promiscuity, pregnancy), history of cooperative exchange (e.g., that one regularly hordes resources from other ingroup members), and information about the reputation of one's kin or allies (see also Barkow, 1992).

Gossip is the mechanism by which social information (derived from direct experience) gets transmitted to absent third parties—individuals who would have remained ignorant about a social event in the absence of language (Bering, in press; see also Dunbar, 2004). From an evolutionary psychological perspective, gossip epitomizes the adaptive problems introduced by language in that language made it possible for social transgressions to be communicated to absent third parties, thereby leaving one susceptible to third-party punishment (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). Thus, the threat of gossip may have encouraged the evolution of altruistic behavior by activating reputational concerns.

In the current study, we sought to test the hypothesis that generous behavior can be motivated by concerns about one's reputation that are specifically mediated by the threat of gossip.

The current study investigated whether the threat of gossip, whereby others are made aware of participants' economic decisions, promotes prosocial behavior in a modified dictator task. The dictator task has been used extensively in economic game theory to investigate selfish motives in social exchange among adults (e.g., Bohnet & Frey, 1999, Eckel & Grossman, 1996, Forsythe et al., 19941; Hoffman et al., 1994, Hoffman et al., 1996, Kahneman et al., 1986, Rankin, 2006) as well as children (Beneson et al., 2007, Harbaugh & Krause, 2000).

The dictator task gets its name from the fact that the first player, the dictator, unilaterally determines the distribution of a monetary or token sum. The dictator is therefore provided a sum of money or tokens and is instructed to distribute the endowment between him or herself and a second individual, the receiver. The receiver is simply a passive recipient and has no sanctioning power over the dictator's actions (cf. the ultimatum game; e.g., Bolton & Zwick, 1995). Because the dictator is under no experimental orders to allocate to the receiver (and the endowment is no more the dictator's than it is the receiver's), any sharing of the endowment represents a departure from selfishness. By allocating to the receiver, the dictator provides the receiver a benefit at a cost to him or herself (i.e., the dictator's net gain suffers).

Past research using the dictator paradigm has investigated the role of “social distance” in encouraging selfish behaviors (Bohnet & Frey, 1999, Hoffman et al., 1996). For example, Hoffman et al. (1996) found dictators to be more selfish when they were socially isolated from the experimenter in addition to their counterparts. The authors concluded that when the opportunity to build a reputation with the experimenter is removed, the incentive to be generous in the dictator task decreases. In the current study, we extended this line of research by investigating participants' concerns about being personally identified via gossip in the context of a dictator task.

In the current study, participants performed an anonymous dictator task as the Allocator (dictator was replaced with this more neutral term). As in previous studies, participants were instructed to distribute an endowment between themselves and an anonymous second party (the Receiver). However, in contrast to previous studies, some participants were led to believe that a third party (either someone who could or could not personally identify them) would learn about their economic decision via the Receiver. In the current study, the third party did not have punitive power (cf., Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004). The third party merely served as a confidant to the Receiver, and the Allocator was made aware of this relationship between the other two players prior to making his or her decision. Importantly, some participants were prompted to disclose personally identifying information (e.g., their names and place of residence) to the third party. This manipulation compromised the participant's anonymity via prospective gossip between the Receiver and the third party.

Based on findings from previous dictator game studies (e.g., Kahneman et al., 1986), we predicted that many participants would distribute the endowment equitably (5-5) regardless of condition. Past research has shown that even in anonymous laboratory settings, participants often defer to a fairness norm of reciprocal exchange (Hoffman et al., 1996). Second, we hypothesized that participants who were told that the Receiver would be communicating their economic decision to a third party would be more generous in their allocation of tokens to the Receiver than participants who were not given this information. Finally, we predicted that this effect would be even greater for participants whose reputation was threatened by their disclosure of personally identifying information to the third party prior to their economic decision.

Section snippets

Participants

Seventy-three undergraduate and postgraduate students from the Queen's University, Belfast (25 male; 48 female) ranging in age from 18 years 1 month to 51 years 10 months (mean, 23 years) participated. One participant indicated that she was not motivated by the study's incentive (she had recently won two £100 lotteries) and was therefore eliminated from the study. This left a total of 72 participants with 18 in each of the four conditions. The majority of students (n=68) were Caucasian

Allocation scores

Mean allocation scores (and standard deviations) by condition are provided in Table 2. Allocation scores represent number of tokens allocated to the Receiver.

A three-way analysis of variance was conducted to assess the effects of sex, reputational concern, and threat of gossip on allocation scores. Although no sex differences were predicted, there is some evidence that sex differences in selfish behavior exist, with males tending to be more selfish than females (e.g., Eckel & Grossman, 1998).

Discussion

The present study sought to test whether the threat of gossip encourages prosocial behavior in a dictator game experiment. We hypothesized that cues about the likelihood of gossip (i.e., the transmission of strategic social information to an absent third party) would serve to promote generous offers. This hypothesis was tested by manipulating whether or not participants were told that a counterpart, the Receiver, would discuss their economic decisions with a third party. Support for this

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Sinead Devane for assisting with data collection, Beth Heywood and Gordon Ingram for helpful comments on earlier drafts, and Greg Shalkoski for help with recruiting participants.

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