From the blockbuster BBC show The Traitors to the Last Supper, humans have always been fascinated by the concept of betrayal. How can you live together, work together, create bonds, and end up destroying everything at the last moment? What made the book and movie The Social Network about the creation of Facebook interesting, for instance, is not Mark Zuckerberg being a greedy capitalist trying to create a massive business. That is a boring and very common story. No, what makes that story special is that, after months of working together towards building the project, Zuckerberg ended up betraying his associates – the Winklevoss twins – and taking all the money for himself. The shocking part is not wanting to make money even if it hurts others. It is carrying out the betrayal even on people you have already walked part of the journey with. Yes, we can feel that betrayal is different from other forms of selfishness, but how exactly can we rationalise and measure the difference between stealing from someone you do not know and from someone you have built a bond with? A MATTER OF TRUST The most famous laboratory experiment looking at this question goes as follow: the experimenter gives someone – the sender – £10. The sender can decide to either keep the money, or send it to someone else – the receiver. If the money is sent, it turns into £30, and the receiver can choose between keeping the money or sending half of it back to the sender, thus they end up with £15 each. The selfish prediction of the outcome of this Trust Game is straightforward: we know that the receiver is better off keeping all the money if they receive it. The sender should expect that, and never send any money. But we also know that people do not always behave as predicted by pure selfishness, and indeed the many experiments about the Trust Game find that a decent fraction of senders do send the money, and that money is often returned to them. The intuition behind why people return money is that not doing so would amount to some form of betrayal. The sender somehow puts their trust in the receiver. Not returning it is not something a nice person would do. But how does it work, specifically? One possible explanation is called reciprocity: the receiver returns the money because they believe the sender has been kind to them. Sending is a kind action because the sender does it without expecting too much in return. WHO FEELS GUILTY? This is a testable prediction: if it is true, we should observe that the more the receiver believes that the sender expects to be betrayed, the more she wants to return money. This is not what research finds. 28 |
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