IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jeborg/v237y2025ics016726812500157x.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Cooperation creates moral obligations

Author

Listed:
  • Cappelen, Alexander W.
  • Gauri, Varun
  • Tungodden, Bertil

Abstract

In a large-scale economic experiment, conducted with a general population sample from the United States, we show that cooperation is seen to create relationship-specific moral obligations among those who cooperate. Participants in the experiment, acting as third party spectators, transfer significantly more money from a lucky to an unlucky worker when the two workers have cooperated with each other than when they have worked independently. In contrast, cooperation is not seen to make the unlucky worker more deserving of help from workers they have not cooperated with. The effect of cooperation is strongly associated with political affiliation: Republicans attach significantly less importance to cooperation as a source of moral obligations than non-Republicans. The findings shed light on the foundations of redistributive preferences and may help explain the difference in the willingness to help in-group members and out-group members.

Suggested Citation

  • Cappelen, Alexander W. & Gauri, Varun & Tungodden, Bertil, 2025. "Cooperation creates moral obligations," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 237(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:237:y:2025:i:c:s016726812500157x
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107038
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016726812500157X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jebo.2025.107038?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:237:y:2025:i:c:s016726812500157x. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jebo .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.