Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation
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Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation Advances in the Sociology of Trust and Cooperation Theory, experiments, and field studies Edited by Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten and Chris Snijders ISBN 978-3-11-064701-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-064749-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-064761-7 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110647495 This word is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For details go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946148 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. ©2020 Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten and Chris Snijders, published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Viesinsh/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesettung: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and Binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Contents Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten and Chris Snijders 1 Complementary Studies on Trust and Cooperation in Social Settings: An Introduction 1 Part I: Theoretical Contributions Thomas Voss 2 Institutional Design and Human Motivation: The Role of Homo Economicus Assumptions 15 Karl-Dieter Opp 3 Rational Choice Theory, the Model of Frame Selection and Other Dual-Process Theories. A Critical Comparison 41 Marcel A.L.M. van Assen and Jacob Dijkstra 4 Too Simple Models in Sociology: The Case of Exchange 75 Andreas Flache 5 Rational Exploitation of the Core by the Periphery? On the Collective (In)efficiency of Endogenous Enforcement of Universal Conditional Cooperation in a Core-Periphery Network 91 Siegwart Lindenberg, Rafael Wittek and Francesca Giardini 6 Reputation Effects, Embeddedness, and Granovetter’s Error 113 Arnout van de Rijt and Vincenz Frey 7 Robustness of Reputation Cascades 141 Henk Flap and Wout Ultee 8 Organized Distrust: If it is there and that Effective, Why Three Recent Scandals? 153 Rainer Hegselmann 9 Polarization and Radicalization in the Bounded Confidence Model: A Computer-Aided Speculation 199 VI Contents Michał Bojanowski 10 Local Brokerage Positions and Access to Unique Information 229 Thomas Gautschi 11 Who Gets How Much in Which Relation? A Flexible Theory of Profit Splits in Networks and its Application to Complex Structures 249 Part II: Experimental Tests Ozan Aksoy 12 Social Identity and Social Value Orientations 295 Fabian Winter and Andreas Diekmann 13 Does Money Change Everything? Priming Experiments in Situations of Strategic Interaction 309 Martin Abraham, Kerstin Lorek and Bernhard Prosch 14 Social Norms and Commitments in Cooperatives – Experimental Evidence 319 Hartmut Esser 15 Rational Choice or Framing? Two Approaches to Explain the Patterns in the Fehr-Gächter-Experiments on Cooperation and Punishment in the Contribution to Public Goods 335 Christoph Engel and Axel Ockenfels 16 Maverick: Experimentally Testing a Conjecture of the Antitrust Authorities 357 Rense Corten, Vincent Buskens and Stephanie Rosenkranz 17 Cooperation, Reputation Effects, and Network Dynamics: Experimental Evidence 391 Davide Barrera, Vincent Buskens and Vera de Rover 18 Comparing Consequences of Carrots and Sticks on Cooperation in Repeated Public Good Games 417 Contents VII Part III: Field Studies Gerrit Rooks, Chris Snijders and Frits Tazelaar 19 A Sociological View on Hierarchical Failure: The Effect of Organizational Rules on Exchange Performance in Buyer-Supplier Transactions 443 Ferry Koster 20 Organizational Innovativeness Through Inter-Organizational Ties 465 Anne Roeters, Esther de Ruijter and Tanja van der Lippe 21 A Transaction Cost Approach to Informal Care 483 Beate Volker 22 Trust is Good – Or is Control Better? Trust and Informal Control in Dutch Neighborhoods – Their Association and Consequences 499 Tom A.B. Snijders and Frank Kalter 23 Religious Diversity and Social Cohesion in German Classrooms: A Micro-Macro Study Based on Empirical Simulations 525 Notes on the Editors and Contributors 545 Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten and Chris Snijders 1 Complementary Studies on Trust and Cooperation in Social Settings: An Introduction Rigorous sociologists should develop sound theoretical predictions to be tested with high-quality empirical research rather than produce ‘teutonischer Tiefsinn’ devoid of empirical content. Werner Raub 1.1 Background The issue of cooperation has been a core topic in the social sciences for a long time, and for good reasons. Many societal matters share that everyone involved knows what they would prefer to see happening, but the incentives are such that this is hard or even impossible to achieve. Examples are abundant, and play at different levels of granularity. At the societal level, one could think of (trying to prevent) the depletion of collective resources or transitioning to a more sustainable society. At the level of organizations, one could think of trying to overcome the impulse to ben- efit in a business relation at the expense of the other party, or of the tendency for businesses to use legal constructs to evade taxes. Regardless of the grandiosity of these cooperation problems, similar arguments play a role in the provision of col- lective goods in neighborhoods or households, and even within a single person there can be friction between the current and the future self. The academic literature has coined the term “social dilemmas” for these kinds of interactions in which sensible decisions by individual actors lead to an outcome that is inferior for all (see Raub, Corten, and Buskens 2015 for a more technical defi- nition). For those unacquainted with the general topic, this sounds hard to imagine. How can it be that we end up in a situation where everybody agrees that an alterna- tive outcome was possible that is better for everybody? Nevertheless, many well- known cooperation problems share this feature. The canonical example of such a problem is the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma (Luce and Raiffa 1957: 94–95; Axelrod 1984). In this game for two actors, the two actors simultaneously choose between two actions, Cooperate or Defect, and the four outcomes that can result from these choices have benefits for both actors as in the left panel of Figure 1.1. Both actors, considering the potential choices of the other player, will conclude that to defect benefits them more than to cooperate, irrespective of what the other actor does, Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten, Department of Sociology / ICS, Utrecht University Chris Snijders, Human Technology Interaction, Eindhoven University of Technology Open Access. © 2020 Vincent Buskens, et al., published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110647495-001 2 Vincent Buskens, Rense Corten and Chris Snijders Trustor Player 1 No trust Trust Cooperate Defect Trustee R R S T Abuse Honor Cooperate 1, 2 1, 2 Player 2 trust trust T S P P P S R Defect 1, 2 1, 2 1 1 1 P T R 2 2 2 Figure 1.1: Prisoner’s Dilemma (left) and Trust Game (right) (Si < Pi < Ri < Ti, i = 1,2). and hence to defect is the rational course of action for each of them. Two actors who think this way will end up with the payoffs that go with mutual defection, even though mutual cooperation would have yielded a better outcome to both. Another type of exchange that differs from the Prisoner’s Dilemma in important aspects but nevertheless shares its social dilemma nature is the Trust Game (Dasgupta 1988), illustrated in the right panel of Figure 1.1. In this game, the moves are sequential rather than simultaneous. In the first move, the “trustor” chooses whether or not to place trust in the “trustee.” If the trustor indeed decides to place trust, the trusteedecideswhethertohonororabuseit.TheoutcomesoftheTrustGameare such that after trust is placed, abusing trust is more beneficial for the trustee than honoring trust. The trustor, anticipating that the trustee will abuse trust if it is placed, will reasonably decide not to trust the trustee. As in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, both actors end up in a situation that is suboptimal as mutual coopera- tion (the trustor placing trust and the trustee honoring trust) would be a better outcome for both. The explanation of these, already very well-known, abstract interactions imme- diately suggests both how theoretical arguments about cooperation problems can take shape and how scholars have tried to tackle the analysis of cooperation and trust problems. For one, these games make clear that not all social dilemmas are equal. Some fit better with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where choice is simultaneous, whereas others resemble a Trust Game, where choice is sequential. Other types of games are often natural extensions of these archetypical ones. It can be sensible to assume more than two actors, more than just two behavioral choices, different kinds of payoffs, uncertainty about choices or payoffs or the type of other players, to assume repetition of interactions, embeddedness of the interactions in a larger setting, or different rules about behavior or outcomes. Theoretical social scientists have covered a variety of such models, trying to identify the conditions under which cooperation may emerge. Such explanations may take place at several levels (cf. Kollock 1998). At an individual level, alternative psychological assumptions on preferences or rationality may be introduced to ex- plain