Shame and honour drive cooperation - 0 views
rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/...rsbl.2011.0367.full
cooperation Jennifer Jacquet shame honor game theory
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Shame is a traditional deterrent from asocial behaviour and is employed when offenders are singled out for public scorn.
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Modern democratic societies have moved away from including the public in the punishment, although in some cases (e.g. drunk driving licence plates) the state still sanctions shame [1].
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We designed this public goods experiment to isolate the effects of being shamed or honoured, with no monetary consequences to either experience, and test whether the expectation of negative or positive reputational information enforces social behaviour.
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If players know that only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, will they cooperate more as a group?
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In games that offer players anonymity, uncooperative behaviour is more prevalent [7] while the opposite is true of games in which players know that each of their decisions will be linked to their real identities [8–10]
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We hypothesized that the threat of shame or the prospect of honour would lead to increased public contributions.
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n contrast to our expectations, we found no significant differences in group contributions over the first 10 rounds between the shame and honour treatments.
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confirming that, even when only the least or most cooperative individuals are to stand in front of their peers, players cooperate more as a group
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Our results show that a promise to single out free-riding individuals for public scrutiny can lead to greater cooperation from the whole group, as can singling out the most generous individuals.
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Group cooperation in the shame treatment significantly declined following round 10 (paired t-test between 10th and 12th round, t = 3.67, p = 0.005), corroborating our finding that the threat of being singled out as a free rider had been driving cooperation.
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Cues of being watched enhance cooperation [11] and when humans lived in small groups, it was easy to observe individual behaviour.
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the absence of shaming by the state does not preclude the absence of shame altogether in society, especially as social media increases the frequency, speed and inclusiveness of communication.
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The Internet increasingly creates a global town square where controls are harder to implement and enforce, gossip travels fast, and where shame as well as honour therefore might experience resurgence.
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Transparency also enhances cooperation [8–10] but can be costly to provide and its use can be limited. Transparency requires time evaluating and determining a satisfactory performance.
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difficult in our current era, where human attention, not information, is a scarce resource [15].