Can we trust the cheap excuse: “I didn’t intend to do it”?
– by Yohsuke Ohtsubo
When you inadvertently step on someone’s foot, what would you say or do? Perhaps, you would say something like “Oops, I’m sorry. I didn’t intend to do that.” Most likely, both you and the other person would find it sufficient. People around you also expect that the other person would respond with something like “never mind.” If you tried to do something more costly, such as kneeling down or offering money to seek forgiveness, people might find it weird.
But suppose that you decline a donation request for victims of a recent massive hurricane. Perhaps you did not have any cash with you at the time; perhaps you had already made a large donation shortly before; or perhaps you do not like the organization because you oppose its past activities. What if you have to decline it in the presence of many friends who are making donations? Unlike the first example of stepping on someone’s foot, your reputation is at stake, and you may not feel that simply saying “I am not stingy” would do all the work.
If you didn’t have any money at the time, you might want to make a donation on another occasion, preferably in the presence of some of the friends. If you had already made a donation, you might prove it by showing a certificate or receipt, if you have one. If you oppose the organization, you might later donate to a different organization and somehow try to let your friends know about it.
If you find these scenarios realistic to some extent, that is because having a reputation as a good person is essential to our social lives. Moreover, that is because we, implicitly or explicitly, know that cheap talk is not credible when something important is at stake. If you could convince your friends simply saying, “I am refusing to donate not because I am stingy, but because blah blah blah,” everyone would do so. They would justify unkind or even mean behavior by offering a cheap excuse.
The preceding paragraph makes two points. First, having a reputation as a good person is important. Second, some costly acts are needed to maintain it. The first point has been intensively studied under the rubric of indirect reciprocity. However, the indirect reciprocity literature has paid much attention to how audiences assign a good or bad reputation to a focal actor. In contrast, little attention has been paid to how focal actors respond to their own reputational predicaments.
We found this to be lacking in balance and developed a model of indirect reciprocity including an option for the focal actor to maintain their reputation. In the standard model of indirect reciprocity, each donor has just two options: to help or not to help their partner. If you help your partner, you are regarded as a good person, and someone else will help you in the future (hence the term “indirect” reciprocity). The flip side of this is that if you decline to help your partner (maybe because you regard them as a bad person), your reputation becomes bad, and you will not be helped by others.
In the standard indirect reciprocity models, each actor’s reputation is entirely determined by others’ reputation-assignment strategy. An actor in the donor role can choose only whether or not to help their partner. After that, they must simply wait and see how others evaluate their behavior. In reality, however, people take various actions to maintain a good reputation. For example, if you decide not to help the current partner because you consider them a “bad” person, you may instead donate to a charitable organization an amount of money equivalent to what would have been needed to help them, to signal that your intention is not bad. We empirically tested this idea in our previous work, in which participants were given a third option—abandoning the endowment that they could have used to help their partner. We observed that participants spontaneously used this option to signal their good (or not bad) intention to others.
An implicit assumption of such signaling models is that the reputation maintenance signals (e.g., donating money to a charitable organization or abandoning an endowment) are costly. Theoretically, this cost is required to make the signals credible. Because of this cost, no one could fake such signals (i.e., by claiming good intentions while having in fact decided to keep the endowment for oneself). However, it has not been empirically tested whether people would abuse a signaling system if it were free.
In our new experiment, participants were given an option to turn on a light on their experimental game screen, which could be observed by other participants. Half of them were allowed to use this option for free, while the other half were required to pay an amount equivalent to what would have been needed to help the current partner. In the free signal condition, participants in fact abused the signaling system. When the signal was costly, it tended to be used to honestly communicate their good intentions. However, when it was free, the signal carried little information about the signalers’ intentions.
In sum, our new study provides empirical evidence for the proverb “actions speak louder than words,” especially in the context of reputation maintenance or self-presentation. When you see someone’s wrongdoing and hear them say, “I didn’t intend to do it,” you may doubt it. Your doubt has empirical support!
