Identity signaling and sustainable cooperation
Cooperation is the foundation of our society. Yet cooperation is challenging in many situations. Why does it sometimes succeed in establishing and maintaining a sustainable partnership over time, while other times it fails? An important factor is trust. However, any partnership between two (or more) people involves a trust issue. A person who trusts another person cannot be sure whether the other person can actually be trusted. How people decide whom to trust and how perceptions of trustworthiness develop over time are therefore important issues to better understand sustainable collaboration.
This thesis investigated the role of identity signals for the perception of trustworthiness and sustainable cooperation. Our results show that identity signals can convey trustworthiness and potentially maintain sustainable trust and cooperation through 3 mechanisms:1. The interaction between and relative impact of behavioural and identity signals. For example, men are generally perceived as less trustworthy than women. But men displaying a signal of past prosocial behaviour (e.g. a badge identifying them as a donor to a charity) may partially offset the negative gender identity signal. 2. Outgroup members can signal trustworthiness by assimilating ingroup norms, provided assimilation takes the form of an expensive investment, such as learning the ingroup language. 3. The relative impact of behavioural and identity signals on restoring trust after a breach of trust.