User:Ronaldwsh/Homo reciprocans

Sex, Age, and Height
A study conducted by Thomas Dohmen and his team of behavioral economists investigated the determinants of trust and reciprocity, in which their results indicated that women hold a higher propensity to trust and, thus reciprocate, than men. This finding is echoed by Warneken and Tomasello’s study on reciprocity in children, through which they found that girls are more prosocial than boys.

Thomas Dohmen and his team of behavioral economists also found a positive correlation between both age and height and one’s trust, meaning that the taller a person is, the more willing they are to trust, and the same idea applies to age—the older one gets, the more trusting they are.

Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter, professors of behavioral economics at the University of Zurich, discovered through their study that women and the elderly are more apt to perform reciprocal behaviors.

Personality
Dohmen’s study on the Big 5 personality types as determinants of trust and reciprocity concluded that all personality types impact one’s propensity to reciprocate positively. On the other hand, in regards to negative reciprocity, they found that extraversion and openness have little to no effect, but people who land on the higher end of the neuroticism spectrum tend to be more negatively reciprocal, while those who are more conscientious and agreeable tend to be less so.

Culture
Cultural psychologists Joan Miller and David Bersoff, in an experimental study in 1994, found that Americans receive greater utility in providing help under a reciprocity condition than without one; on the other hand, Indians displayed virtually no difference in utility with or without a prior reciprocal occasion.

In a similar study conducted by Miller and seven other psychologists, they found that Indians base their reciprocal acts on communal norms while Americans’ are contingent on reciprocal exchanges. An example of such difference is that Indians act upon their peers’ requests for assistance repeatedly throughout their lifetimes, whereas Americans show reciprocal behaviors shortly, and only, after altruistic acts were performed towards them.

Perceived Motives
Yesim Orhun, a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School Business, emphasizes the significance of people’s perceived dispositions in reciprocal situations in her research on perceived motives and reciprocity. She asserts that generosity becomes polluted if the impression of an expected return of favor is given during an act of kindness. However, she also notes that perceived kindness is only a factor in positive reciprocity because the intentions of a person who commits harmful acts are apparent, but those of a person who performs beneficial acts are ambiguous, unsure of intentions behind.