Collaborating at the Tower of Babel: The Meaning of Cooperation and the Foundations of Long-Term Exchange

Abstract

Cooperation requires not only that exchange partners take cooperative actions but also that they arrive at a mutual understanding of the specific actions that constitute cooperation (vs. defection). Absent such shared understandings, even cooperative actions may be interpreted as defection, leading to the termination of the exchange. While prior work has found that shared understandings of cooperation are present in long-term exchange relationships, a critical question remains: how can new relationships lacking such shared understandings survive into longevity?I propose and validate a general process by which exchange partners can arrive at a shared understanding of what cooperation means in changing and complex environments, thereby making cooperation and long-term exchange possible. At the heart of the analytic strategy is the differentiation between two contexts: one in which exchange partners can rely on established, commonly known frameworks and one in which a mutual understanding cannot be achieved without the joint development of a new relationship-specific framework. A set of online experiments validates the key theoretical implication. When established frameworks are unavailable, low-stakes joint problem solving helps forge mutual understandings that support cooperation and long-term exchange. By contrast, when relationships are not needed to develop mutual understanding, joint problem solving (and long-term exchange), may not be valuable for supporting cooperation.