Imagine a scenario where you are constantly doing favors for a friend of yours, but when you are the one who needs help they are always nowhere to be found. Most people would soon catch on that this friend is not willing to return favors and would eventually stop providing favors for that friend. The unwritten social rule of repaying favors that others give to you is known in social psychology as reciprocity. Reciprocity is the basis of social interaction and human survival. Humans have evolved through learning how to share resources with one another, and who to trust when sharing those resources. It is an adaptive trait for humans to recognize if they should invest resources in others based on the probability that they will in turn receive resources back.
Psychological studies have been conducted around a social experiment known as the “prisoner’s dilemma” to determine how people process reciprocity. The scenario is conducted with two alleged criminals that are interrogated in separate rooms. Each prisoner has the choice to cooperate with the police and confess to the crime, or to refuse to speak. In this dilemma if both prisoners choose not to speak, they are both set free. If one prisoner cooperates with police, they receive a reduced sentence while the other prisoner receives a harsh punishment. If both prisoners cooperate with police, they both receive a moderate punishment. A study by Bell et al., (2016) conducted a modified version of the prisoner’s dilemma where the prisoners were given the dilemma four times in a row. The study involved the prisoners wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, which allows researchers to measure and record the electrical activity of the brain. The EEG machine recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) which are voltage spikes in the brain of humans that occur while they think. The purpose was to determine how ERPs changed during the decision making for the prisoners. It was assumed from previous research that prisoners would show higher levels of ERPs when shown the picture of a prisoner who they knew had cooperated with police, compared to a prisoner who did not speak. The reasoning behind this was that it was assumed that humans focused more of their memory on people who cooperated with police because they were considered to have broken the social rule of reciprocity. This meant that prisoners should not stay quiet for them because they would not return the favor. This is because it would result in an increased punishment for the prisoner who chose to staying quiet.
It was discovered that there was no consistent ERP evidence that the prisoners focused on the other prisoner’s decision to cooperate with police more than the other prisoner’s decision to stay quiet. This suggests that prisoners were not making decisions based only on the amount of times the other prisoner displayed reciprocity. This study instead found that ERP patterns showed that prisoners would recall the context of past police cooperation and staying silent decisions a similar amount while they decided on what decision they would make for the current round. This means that while in the prisoner’s dilemma, participants combined the past decisions of the other prisoner with the context in which they made the decision to create a flexible thought process to base future decisions off of.
Research suggests that it important for people to detect individuals who will not reciprocate in social settings. Investing too many resources in others that do not repay you can have negative survival implications. This study suggests that humans take into account the context in which reciprocity occurs to make decisions on social investment. If humans were to strictly deny other members of society that did not show reciprocity regardless of the context, it would lead to social problems due to humans having such a complex set of standards for social interactions. Including context in judging the decisions of other individuals allows humans to more easily find people to cooperate with. The increase in cooperation is beneficial to the survival of humans. This research provides people with the knowledge to be cautious of whom they invest resources in, but also suggests that the context in which people make decisions is important to consider.
Source:
Bell, R., Sasse, J., Möller, M., Czernochowski, D., Mayr, S., & Buchner, A. (2016). Event?related potentials in response to cheating and cooperation in a social dilemma game. Psychophysiology, 53(2), 216-228.
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