When cooperative motives lead to uncooperative behaviour

The role of reciprocity in eliciting prosociality as well as deceitfulness in young children

Speaker: Dr Sebastian Grueneisen, University of Leipzig

Abstract

Reciprocity, the practice to exchange favours over time, is a key mechanism supporting cooperation in humans and nonhuman animals alike.

The propensity to reciprocate favours develops early in childhood, opening avenues for forming mutually beneficial relationships and for cultivating joint cooperative endeavours.

What has largely been overlooked, however, is that reciprocal motives can also encourage ethically questionable behaviours (e.g., when a politician returns favours to campaign donors at the expense of their constituents).

In this talk, I will discuss recent research investigating the developmental origins of reciprocity and its prosocial as well as its deceitful expressions.

In a series of behavioural experiments, young children interacted with social partners who either did or did not intentionally benefit them at a personal cost. In subsequent interactions, children from around age 5 to 6 reliably responded by prosaically sharing resources in return.

Yet, we also found that children tended to cheat in favour of their benefactors (even though they condemned such cheating in others) and they were more likely to turn a blind eye to their benefactor’s transgressions compared to the transgressions committed by others (even though, from an observer perspective, they disapproved of rules being enforced unequally).

The findings demonstrate that young children are sometimes willing to flout rules they otherwise condone in favour of reciprocating prosocial acts.

The further point to the possibility that cooperative motives that are foundational for human flourishing can also be implicated in the erosion of societal norms.