Well-enforced norms create an opportunity for norm breakers to cooperate in ventures requiring trust. This is realized when norm breakers, by sharing evidence of their breaches, make themselves vulnerable to denunciation and therefore trustworthy. The sharing of compromising information (SCI) is a strategy employed by criminals, politicians, and other actors wary of their partners’ trustworthiness in which the cost of ensuring compliance is offloaded on clueless norm enforcers. Here we introduce SCI as a sui generis cooperative strategy and test its functioning experimentally. In our experiment, subjects first acquire the label “dove” or “hawk” depending on how cooperative or uncooperative they are, respectively. Hawks acquire compromising information embodied in their label and can reveal it before an interaction with trust at stake. Unlike doves, hawks who reveal their label make themselves vulnerable to their partners, who can inflict a penalty on them after interaction. We find that even students in as artificial a setting as a computerized decision laboratory grasp the advantage of SCI and use it to cooperate. Our results corroborate the idea that compromising information can be conceived as a “hostage” that, when mutually exchanged, makes each party to the interaction vulnerable and therefore trustworthy in joint endeavours.

中文翻译：

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共享破坏性信息作为合作策略

规范良好的规范为打破规范的人提供了在需要信任的企业中进行合作的机会。当违反规范的人通过分享违反的证据而使自己容易受到谴责并因此值得信赖时，就可以实现这一点。共享破坏性信息（SCI）是犯罪分子，政客和其他行为者所采取的一种策略，他们警惕其伙伴的可信度，在此过程中，确保遵从性的成本被无知的规范执行者分担了。在这里，我们将SCI作为一种特殊的合作策略进行介绍，并通​​过实验测试其功能。在我们的实验中，受试者首先根据他们的合作或不合作而获得标签“鸽子”或“鹰”。Hawks会获得其标签中包含的有损信息，并且可以在与信任关系互动之前将其披露。不像鸽子 暴露自己标签的鹰派很容易受到伴侣的伤害，而伴侣在交往后会受到惩罚。我们发现，即使是像计算机决策实验室这样的人造环境的学生，也可以掌握SCI的优势并利用它进行合作。我们的结果证实了这样一种观点，即可以将破坏性信息视为一种“人质”，当彼此交换时，它们会使互动的每一方都变得脆弱，因此值得我们共同努力。