| Popis: |
Reciprocity is at the heart of human prosociality. It has been shown that the willingness to reciprocate when others act in a way that benefits us, depends on how much one benefits from the partner's decisions or actions. Further, it has been demonstrated that people are more persistent, are more eager to put forth effort, and are more morally judgmental of commitment violations when they perceive that their partner's investment of effort in a shared action is costly. To our knowledge, what has not been investigated so far is whether people make their reciprocation dependent on the benefit they received or the opportunity cost that their partner paid. We hypothesize that individuals consider their partner’s opportunity cost, before they engage in reciprocal interactions. They are able to compute the opportunity costs of others and base their decision according to the cost their partner had to forego in order for them to receive a specific benefit. We argue that individuals tend to reciprocate based on the expectations of others towards them (“What do I think you expect me to do?”), implying that there is indeed a prosocial aspect to the action. Positive reciprocation refers to actions individuals take in accordance with the actions they receive from others (“equivalent in value”). In terms of opportunity costs, reciprocators tend to tailor their altruistic behaviour based on the cost of the partner. Consequently, individuals should be sensitive to opportunity costs of their partners and magnitude of the costs when making reciprocal choices. Our predictions are based on the cognitive hypothesis that reciprocation is a decision that results from compiling the expectations of others towards the self. Someone entering a social interaction is likely to expect to benefit from this decision. More precisely, they are likely to expect that the benefit resulting from this decision will be at least as big as the benefits they would have got from alternative options—the opportunity cost. We hypothesize that people will manifest a preference to fulfil such expectation. We predict that individuals are more sensitive to the opportunity cost of their social partner than to their own benefit received from the interaction. |
