Maintaining cooperation through vertical communication of trust when removing sanctions.

ABSTRACT: 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

SUBMITTER: Posten AC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11962493 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature