The role of future planning, patience, and risk tolerance for prospective reciprocity in human adults

The current study aimed to test a suite of psychological proximate mechanisms that are critical for a form of cooperation thought to be unique to humans: prospective reciprocity – engaging in cooperative acts with the anticipation that benefits will be returned in the future. We developed and validated a novel online test battery with n = 297 participants to assess individual differences in three cognitive domains (planning, patience, risk tolerance) and their potential relation to participants’ responses in different prospective reciprocity tasks. Our tasks assessing patience showed high internal consistency and were positively correlated with prospective reciprocity. The pattern was less clear for risk, where association patterns varied across tasks. Planning ability was negatively correlated with one of the prospective reciprocity tasks. Our results suggest that all three cognitive domains are relevant for explaining prospective reciprocity; however, they also warrant caution for interpreting findings based on single behavioral elicitation methods, and call for a better psychometric understanding of behavioral tasks.