A Study On The Effect Of Social Information And Its Order In Upstream Indirect Reciprocity

Since the reform and opening up in the 1990 s,China has experienced rapid development in science,technology,and infrastructure,which has expanded people’s social sphere and reduced their cross regional mobility due to time and space constraints.With the expansion of people’s communication scope and the increasing complexity of interpersonal communication,direct reciprocity,which usually occurs in small clusters with frequent communication,gradually evolves into indirect reciprocity,both of which coexist in society.With the development of society,the amount of information people acquire gradually increases,and these diverse pieces of information are often transmitted to people in different orders.The transmission order of information has a strong impact on the way people integrate,remember and process information.Different transmission orders of the same information often produce different results.Social information affects people’s indirect reciprocal behavior,so how does the order effect of social information affect people’s indirect reciprocal behavior? This paper designed an indirect reciprocity experiment based on a two-stage dictator game.By introducing multiple pieces of social information about the distribution behavior of others,and passing them to the experimental subjects in different order,we studied the impact of the order effect of social information on indirect reciprocity.The level of indirect reciprocity is mainly measured by the assigned value of the subjects in the second stage.We conducted a nonparametric test on the indirect reciprocal distribution values of the subjects,and used the difference-in-difference model for parametric testing.The experimental results show that the order effect of social information has an impact on indirect reciprocity,with the order effect of high social information promoting indirect reciprocity,while the order effect of low social information inhibiting indirect reciprocity.The different transmission order of social information also has an impact on indirect reciprocity.Compared with the transmission order from low to high,the transmission order of social information from high to low can promote indirect reciprocity more.Our experimental results are of great significance.The design of economic experiments should take into account the impact of sequence effects on the behavior of subjects,in order to obtain more reliable experimental results;For charitable organizations,when organizing donation activities,they can increase the amount of donations by providing information about the amount donated by others and changing the transmission order of these information;For society,a reasonable and fair solution to people’s demands is one of the conditions for promoting indirect reciprocal communication and building a harmonious society.