Reciprocity in ambiguous situations: Default psychological strategies underlying ambiguity resolution in moral decision-making

When deciding whether to reciprocate trust, people are typically strongly influenced by how much trust their interaction partner has originally shown them. If a partner has placed a lot of trust in you, there is a strong motivation to reciprocate, and indeed this factor often outweighs pro-self considerations to maximize one’s own financial payout. However, one important unanswered question in this regard is what people decide to do when this prior information is ambiguous; that is, when they do not know for sure exactly how trusting their partner has been. How then do people decide to reciprocate? This study utilizes a novel version of the Trust Game to directly address this question. Here, we develop, and validate, a computational model-based approach to quantify and categorize how participants assessed the trustworthiness of an unfamiliar partner when making reciprocity decisions. We find that participants spontaneously use their prior experience about the trustingness of game partners in general to inform their reciprocity decisions, even when they had the opportunity to strategically assume that their new, unfamiliar, partners were untrusting, and hence could have justified lower reciprocation rates.