ArticleScientific reports2020
Scarce and directly beneficial reputations support cooperation.
Article in Scientific reports, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- Reputation in the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: A Simple, Analytically Solvable Agents' Model.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Cooperation is not rewarded by friendship, but generous and selfish students repel each other in social networks.PloS one · 2025Article
- Trust within human-machine collectives depends on the perceived consensus about cooperative norms.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Clustering drives cooperation on reputation networks, all else fixed.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
- Gossip promotes cooperation only when it is pro-socially motivated.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Four Puzzles of Reputation-Based Cooperation : Content, Process, Honesty, and Structure.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2022Article
- Article
- Networks of reliable reputations and cooperation: a review.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Honesty and dishonesty in gossip strategies: a fitness interdependence analysis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The benefits of being seen to help others: indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner choice.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Evaluating mechanisms that could support credible reputations and cooperation: cross-checking and social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Reputation and socio-ecology in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Local reputation, local selection, and the leading eight norms.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- No good deed goes unpunished: the social costs of prosocial behaviour.Evolutionary human sciences · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A human solution to the problem of cooperation is the maintenance of informal reputation hierarchies. Reputational information contributes to cooperation by providing guidelines about previous group-beneficial or free-rider behaviour in social dilemma interactions. How reputation information could be credible, however, remains a puzzle. We test two potential safeguards to ensure credibility: (i) reputation is a scarce resource and (ii) it is not earned for direct benefits. We test these solutions in a laboratory experiment in which participants played two-person Prisoner's Dilemma games without partner selection, could observe some other interactions, and could communicate reputational information about possible opponents to each other. Reputational information clearly influenced cooperation decisions. Although cooperation was not sustained at a high level in any of the conditions, the possibility of exchanging third-party information was able to temporarily increase the level of strategic cooperation when reputation was a scarce resource and reputational scores were directly translated into monetary benefits. We found that competition for monetary rewards or unrestricted non-monetary reputational rewards helped the reputation system to be informative. Finally, we found that high reputational scores are reinforced further as they are rewarded with positive messages, and positive gossip was leading to higher reputations.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.