How emotion communication guides reciprocity: Establishing cooperation through disappointment and anger

By Maarten J. J. Wubben, David de Cremer, Eric van Dijk. 2009

98 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Emotions fulfill many social functions, but data on their essential function of establishing cooperation are lacking. We investigated how communicating anger and disappointment guides reciprocal cooperative behavior. Although anger may force cooperation by announcing retaliation, we predicted that communicating disappointment was less likely to backfire. A laboratory study in which participants played against the reciprocal strategy of tit-for-tat showed that communicated disappointment established more cooperation than did anger. This effect also carried over to future cooperation decisions. Partners communicating disappointment evoked less anger, were evaluated more positively and as forgiving rather than retaliatory. Communication of disappointment thus appears conducive to establishing mutually beneficial relationships.

Subfields: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f524cb96381d323413962366a593ca5fc6a4332f

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In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Social Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Emotion is for influence (2011, background): “Finally, recent work indicates that expressions of disappointment are less likely to backfire than expressions of anger, because the former are less likely to trigger negative affective reactions (Wubben, De Cremer, & Van Dijk, 2009 ).”