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Morality Games
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Psychologists and economists sometimes take this “norm” as given, without asking where it comes from, and a naive reading of Trivers would lead one to think that we should be sensitive to the magnitude of the initial favor and whether it is manipulative.

However, according to the above model, reciprocity is the Nash equilibrium, even if the favors are not evenly matched or manipulative, since, in equilibrium, we are neither sensitive to such quantitative distinctions nor to whether the initial reciprocity was manipulative, unless these facts are commonly known.

Self-Image Concerns. People sometimes play mental tricks in order to appear to themselves as pro-social. For example, in an experiment, subjects will voluntarily take on a boring task to save another subject from doing it, but if given the option of privately flipping a coin to determine who gets the task, they often flip—and flip, and flip again—until the “coin” assigns the task to the other subject (Batson, Kobrynowicz, Dinnerstein, Kampf, & Wilson, 1997). Why would we be able to fool ourselves and not, say, recognize that we are gaming the coin flip? Why do we care what we think of ourselves at all? Are there any constraints on how we will deceive ourselves?

Such self-image considerations can be explained by noting that our self-image can act as a simple proxy, albeit an imperfect one, for what others think of us, and also that we are more convincing to others when we believe something ourselves (Kurzban, 2012; Trivers, 2011). This explanation suggests that the ways we deceive ourselves correspond to quirks described throughout this section—for example, we will absolve ourselves of remaining strategically ignorant even when it is easy not to, or be convinced that we have done good by voting, even if we cannot swing an election.

Framing Effects. Whether we contribute is highly dependent on the details of the experiment, such as the choice set (List, 2007) and the labels for the different choices (Ross & Ward, 1996; Roth, 1995). Such findings are often taken as evidence that social preferences cannot be properly measured in the lab (Levitt & List, 2007).

We believe a more fruitful interpretation is simply that the frame influences whether the laboratory experiment “turns on” our pro-social preferences, perhaps by simulating a situation where cooperation is expected (Levitt & List, 2007).

One-Shot Anonymous Giving: We give in anonymous, one-shot settings, such as dictator games. We also sacrifice for others in the real world when there is no chance of reciprocation: Heroes jump on grenades to save their fellow soldiers or block the door to a classroom with their bodies to prevent a school shooter from entering (Rand & Epstein, 2014). This is often seen as evidence for a role of group selection (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2003).

However, an alternate explanation is that we do not consider the likelihood of reciprocation (Hoffman et al., 2015), as described above. To explain the laboratory evidence, there are two more possibilities. First, subjects may believe there is some chance their identity will be revealed and feel the costs of being revealed as selfish are greater than the gains from the experiment (Delton, Krasnow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2011). Second, we again emphasize that learned or evolved preferences and ideologies are expected to be applied even in novel settings to which they are not optimized.

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