Coordinated decision-making boosts altruistic motivation—But not trust

Abstract

In the current study, we separately tested whether coordinated decision-making increases altruism and whether it increases trust. To this end, we implemented a paradigm in which participants repeatedly perform a coordinated decision-making task either with the same partner on every trial, or with a different partner on each trial. When both players coordinate on the same option, both are rewarded. In Experiment 1 (N = 52), participants were sometimes presented with tempting opportunities to defect. In Experiment 2 (N = 97), participants sometimes had to decide whether or not to trust that their partners had resisted such tempting opportunities. The results show that repeatedly coordinating with the same partner increased participants’ resistance to temptation (Experiment 1) but did not increase trust (Experiment 2). These findings support the hypothesis that coordinating with a partner increases altruistic motivation towards that partner; they do not support the hypothesis that coordinating boosts trust.