Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Helping is a universal human behavior, and is a core aspect of a functioning society. However, the decision to provide help, and what type of help to provide, is a complex cognitive calculation that weights many costs and benefits simultaneously. In this paper, we explore how various costs influence the moment-to-moment decision to help in a simple video game. Participants were paired with another human participant and were asked to make repeated decisions that could benefit either themselves or their partner. Several preregistered manipulations altered the cost each person paid for actions in the environment, the intrinsic resource capacity of individuals to perform the task, the visibility of the other player's score, and the affordances within the environment for helping. The results give novel insight into the cost-benefit analyses that people apply when providing help, and highlight the role of reciprocity in influencing helping decisions.