Maintaining cooperation through vertical communication of trust when removing sanctions
Edited by Karen Cook, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; received August 28, 2024; accepted January 29, 2025
Significance
An effective way to ensure cooperation is to sanction noncompliance. Yet, once sanctions are removed, cooperation tends to drop. We demonstrate that vertical communication by authorities can help maintain cooperation when abolishing punishment institutions. Specifically, we show that when authorities communicate their trust in the population to cooperate in the absence of punishment institutions, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy and leads people to maintain cooperation even in the absence of punishment. Our findings complement previous literature on (horizontal) norms, beliefs, and conditional cooperation. They offer valuable insights that can help authorities maintain voluntary cooperation, even after enforcement mechanisms are terminated (for example, after a pandemic) or extremely difficult to monitor (for example, energy conservation regulations).
Abstract
An effective way to foster cooperation is to monitor behavior and sanction freeriding. Yet, previous studies have shown that cooperation quickly declines when sanctioning mechanisms are removed. We test whether explicitly expressing trust in players’ capability to maintain cooperation after the removal of sanctions, i.e., vertical communication of trust, has the potential to alleviate this drop in compliance. Four incentivized public-goods experiments (N = 2,823) find that the vertical communication of trust maintains cooperation upon the removal of centralized (Study 1), third-party (Study 2a, 2b), and peer punishment (Study 3), and this effect extends beyond single interactions (Study 4). In all studies, vertical trust communication increases mutual trust among players, providing support to the idea that vertically communicating trust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Extrapolating our findings to natural environments, they suggest that authorities should carefully consider how they communicate the lifting of rules and sanctions.
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Data, Materials, and Software Availability
Data, code, and materials are deposited through the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/duvrc (48). Studies were preregistered at https://aspredicted.org/ and are accessible via OSF (Studies 1, 2a, 2b, 3, and 4) (48).
Acknowledgments
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2126/1-390838866 and the research grant PO 1850/3-1 awarded to A.-C.P. Declaration of AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process: During the preparation of this work, we used you.com in order to improve readability and language. After using this service, we reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.
Author contributions
A.-C.P., P.U., S.K., and J.L. designed research; A.-C.P. performed research; A.-C.P. analyzed data; and A.-C.P., P.U., S.K., and J.L. wrote the paper.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interest.
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Copyright © 2025 the Author(s). Published by PNAS. This article is distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND).
Data, Materials, and Software Availability
Data, code, and materials are deposited through the OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/duvrc (48). Studies were preregistered at https://aspredicted.org/ and are accessible via OSF (Studies 1, 2a, 2b, 3, and 4) (48).
Submission history
Received: August 28, 2024
Accepted: January 29, 2025
Published online: March 17, 2025
Published in issue: March 25, 2025
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Acknowledgments
Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy—EXC 2126/1-390838866 and the research grant PO 1850/3-1 awarded to A.-C.P. Declaration of AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process: During the preparation of this work, we used you.com in order to improve readability and language. After using this service, we reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.
Author contributions
A.-C.P., P.U., S.K., and J.L. designed research; A.-C.P. performed research; A.-C.P. analyzed data; and A.-C.P., P.U., S.K., and J.L. wrote the paper.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interest.
Notes
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
*
In our four main experiments, the communicating authority is the experimenter, and in a complementary experiment (Study 2b), it is a participant who is granted this authority.
†
Studies were conducted in a different chronological order than the order in which they appear here. We thank two anonymous referees for suggesting complementary Study 2b.
‡
For all studies, planned contrasts controlled for participants’ individual propensity to cooperate (i.e., round 1 contributions).
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Maintaining cooperation through vertical communication of trust when removing sanctions, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
122 (12) e2415010122,
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415010122
(2025).
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