The current research examines the role of social value orientation in determining the extent to which individuals are inclined to reciprocate cooperation exhibited by others perceived as either honest, intelligent, or unintelligent. Results revealed that individuals with prosocial orientation reciprocated high levels of cooperation regardless of other's characteristics. Individuals with proself orientation (i.e. individualists and competitors) exhibited some reciprocal cooperation toward others perceived as honest, yet took advantage of others perceived as intelligent or unintelligent. These results suggest that proselfs can be motivated to reciprocate cooperation by others if they have faith in others' benign intentions and trustworthiness. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Introduction
How do we respond to others who have been helpful to us? Do we reciprocate such helpfulness, or might we be somewhat tempted to exploit such helpfulness, and not exchange this favour in return? Tendencies toward reciprocal cooperation (or reciprocal altruism) have been claimed to be a ubiquitous and functional approach to interpersonal relationships (cf. Gouldner, 1960), particularly when these relationships are challenged by social dilemmas (i.e. conΒ―icts of self-interests and joint interest; cf. Axelrod, 1984;Komorita, Parks, & Hulbert, 1991). We propose that tendencies toward reciprocal cooperation are at least partially aected by individual dierences in social value orientation (i.e. preferences for particular distributions of outcomes for