The effect of motivations on social indirect reciprocity: an experimental analysis

This article investigates the effect of motivations on the perceived kindness of an action within the context of social indirect reciprocity (if A helps B, then C helps A). We test experimentally the hypothesis that, for a given distributional outcome, an action is perceived by a third party to be less kind if it can be strategically motivated. As a consequence, intention-based reciprocity should be stronger in the absence of strategic motivations. The results do not support this hypothesis: social indirect reciprocity is found to be less strong when strategic motivations can be ruled out.