Reputation and anticipated repeat interactions drive stranger cooperation from the first round.

Evidence

In economic game experiments that model everyday interactions, total strangers are placed in cooperative dilemmas, where they are given a certain amount of money, which they can decide to keep or share with others. Mutual cooperation means profit for everyone, but how do you avoid being the sucker who cooperates but never receives anything in return? In such experiments, participants are typically found to cooperate more when they expect to interact with the same person repeatedly in the future, and this occurs right from the first round. That is, people respond to reciprocity incentives; they do not learn to cooperate by trial and error. But it’s not just the expectation of future interactions that makes strangers more cooperative. Knowledge of a partner’s previous play, even with a different player, or reputation, dramatically affects cooperation levels, and so does the threat of punishment. What makes friendships and alliances work, therefore, are reputation, expectations of future interactions, and the opportunity to retaliate selfish acts if necessary. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 34

Categorization

• XREF: Baumard et al.’s partner-choice theory: reputation monitoring and partner selection underpin the reader’s analytical frame for how fumi-e public trampling destroys partner choice.