Extortion, intuition, and the dark side of reciprocity

Extortion occurs when one person uses some combination of threats and promises to extract an unfair share of benefits from another. Although extortion is a pervasive feature of human interaction, it has received relatively little attention in psychological research. But, we argue, extortion is structured quite similarly to far better-studied "reciprocal" social behaviors, such as conditional cooperation and retributive punishment. All of these strategies function to elicit some desirable behavior from a social partner and do so by constructing conditional incentives. The main difference is that the desired behavioral response is an unfair or unjust allocation of resources during extortion, whereas it is typically assumed to be a fair or just distribution of resources in studies of reciprocal cooperation and punishment. Thus, we propose that a common set of psychological mechanisms may render these strategies successful. We know from prior work that prosocial forms of reciprocity often work best when implemented inflexibly and intuitively, rather than deliberatively. This both affords long-term commitment to the reciprocal strategy, and also signals this commitment to social partners. We argue that, for the same reasons, extortion is likely to depend largely upon inflexible, intuitive psychological processes. Several existing lines of circumstantial evidence support this conjecture.