Maintaining cooperation through vertical communication of trust when removing sanctions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Posten, Ann-Christin; Ugurlar, Pinar; Kube, Sebastian; Lammers, Joris
• 署名单位: University of Limerick; Ozyegin University; University of Bonn; University of Bonn; Max Planck Society; University of Cologne
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-11985
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2415010122
• 发表日期: 2025-03-25
• 关键词: collective action; PUNISHMENT; FOUNDATIONS; mood

摘要

An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behavior and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test whether explicitly expressing trust in players' capability to maintain cooperation after the removal of sanctions, i.e., vertical communication of trust, has the potential to alleviate this drop in compliance. Four incentivized public- goods experiments (N = 2,823) find that the vertical communication of trust maintains cooperation upon the removal of centralized (Study 1), third- party (Study 2a, 2b), and peer punishment (Study 3), and this effect extends beyond single interactions (Study 4). In all studies, vertical trust communication increases mutual trust among players, providing support to the idea that vertically communicating trust can be a self- fulfilling prophecy. Extrapolating our findings to natural environments, they suggest that authorities should carefully consider how they communicate the lifting of rules and sanctions.