A model of reciprocity: Explaining cooperation in groups

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 108(2) of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (see record 2009-03083-015). In the original article the abstract is missing and pages 91, 92 contains many mistakes. The corrected abstract, sentences and figures are given in the erratum.] In this article, we will examine the cognitive processes underlying cooperation in groups and how these processes lead to different cooperative outcomes depending on the structure of the public goods situation. To test the different approaches, we first assessed participants' social value orientation and then had them play either the PG game or the social dilemma network (SDN) game. The 60 participants with an average age of 24 years were mainly students from different departments of the Free University Berlin. We first describe participants' contributions in the games and test how their contributions correspond to social value orientations. Thereafter we compare the three models in terms of their ability to predict participants' decisions and information search. The present study contributes two key findings to the understanding of cooperation in groups. First, cooperation in groups can be increased by an interaction structure that allows people to allocate their resources freely to cooperate with different group members, as implemented here in the social dilemma network. Second, neither the two learning models nor people's social value orientation provided a good overall account of people's behavior in the social dilemma situation when compared to the reciprocity model, which proved best in predicting information search and cooperative behavior in groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)