RT Journal Article
T1 Gossip and competitive altruism support cooperation in a Public Good Game
A1 Giardini, Francesca
A1 Vilone, Daniele
A1 Sánchez, Angel
A1 Antonioni, Alberto
AB When there is an opportunity to gain a positive reputation, individuals are more willing to sacrifice their immediate self-interest. Partner choice creates opportunities for competitive altruism, i.e. individuals compete to be regarded as more generous and to be chosen for future partnerships. Tests of the competitive altruism hypothesis have focused so far on reputation based on direct observation, whereas the role of gossip has not been theoretically and empirically addressed. Partner choice can create an incentive to cooperate and to send truthful messages, but it can also work in the opposite direction. In order to understand the consequences of partner choice on cooperation and gossip, we designed an experimental study in which participants played a sequence of Public Goods games and gossip rounds. In our two treatments, we observed that cooperation increased when there was an opportunity to be selected, but also that cooperators sent more honest messages than defectors, and that this strategy was prevalent in the treatment in which inter-group competition was implemented. We also found evidence that participants detached themselves from the information more often when lying. Taken together, our study fills a theoretical and empirical gap by showing that partner choice increases both cooperation and honesty of gossip.
PB The Royal Society
SN 0962-8436
YR 2021
FD 2021-11-22
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10016/36298
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10016/36298
LA eng
NO Supplementary material from "Gossip and competitive altruism support cooperation in a Public Good Game", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences. Posted on 2021-09-02. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.5599828
NO This work was supported by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades/FEDER (Spain/UE) grant no. PGC2018-098186-B-I00 (BASIC). This work has been supported by the Madrid Government (Comunidad de Madrid-Spain) under the Multiannual Agreement with UC3M in the line of Excellence of University Professors (EPUC3M23), and in the context of the V PRICIT (Regional Programme of Research and Technological Innovation). A.A. gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant nos. FJCI-2016-28276 and IJC2019-040967-I.
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