ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The benefits of being seen to help others: indirect reciprocity and reputation-based partner choice.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- One's Actions "Aging Poorly": An Integrative Egocentric Framework for Understanding Impression Management Errors and the Challenge of Temporal Impression Management.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Review
- Intuitive and deliberative processes underlying commitment signaling for cooperative assortment.iScience · 2026Article
- Partner choice increases observed reciprocity-based cooperation but decreases unobserved stake-based cooperation.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Ethics trumps resources in women's and men's evaluations of potential mates and competitors.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The social leverage effect: Institutions transform weak reputation effects into strong incentives for cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Unveiling the veil: exploring how wellbeing motivations shape anonymous and public prosocial behavior in Indonesia.BMC psychology · 2024Article
- Evidence of direct and indirect reciprocity in network-structured economic games.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Human and nonhuman norms: a dimensional framework.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Chimpanzees engage in competitive altruism in a triadic ultimatum game.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Social observation modulates the influence of socioeconomic status on pro-environmental behavior: an event-related potential study.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2024Article
- Unravelling the many facets of human cooperation in an experimental study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- "Fill the World with Love": Songs with Prosocial Lyrics Enhance Online Charitable Donations among Chinese Adults.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Do you reap what you sow? Driving mechanism of supply chain transparency on consumers' indirect reciprocity.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Interaction between games give rise to the evolution of moral norms of cooperation.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Reputation structure in indirect reciprocity under noisy and private assessment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Male services during between-group conflict: the 'hired gun' hypothesis revisited.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Third-party punishers do not compete to be chosen as partners in an experimental game.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Partner choice does not predict prosociality across countries.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
When one individual helps another, it benefits the recipient and may also gain a reputation for being cooperative. This may induce others to favour the helper in subsequent interactions, so investing in being seen to help others may be adaptive. The best-known mechanism for this is indirect reciprocity (IR), in which the profit comes from an observer who pays a cost to benefit the original helper. IR has attracted considerable theoretical and empirical interest, but it is not the only way in which cooperative reputations can bring benefits. Signalling theory proposes that paying a cost to benefit others is a strategic investment which benefits the signaller through changing receiver behaviour, in particular by being more likely to choose the signaller as a partner. This reputation-based partner choice can result in competitive helping whereby those who help are favoured as partners. These theories have been confused in the literature. We therefore set out the assumptions, the mechanisms and the predictions of each theory for how developing a cooperative reputation can be adaptive. The benefits of being seen to be cooperative may have been a major driver of sociality, especially in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'The language of cooperation: reputation and honest signalling'.
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