Reciprocal Integrity

last updated 2024-09-21

Reciprocal integrity is a combination of the concepts of reciprocity and personal integrity. Reciprocity means treating others the way you want to be treated. Personal integrity means your language and your behavior line up.

Reciprocal integrity is the practice of interpreting other people’s language and behavior as charitably as you want yours to be interpreted.

Approximately speaking, reciprocal integrity can be characterized as generalized steelmanning (i.e. assuming good intent and interpreting a person’s words and actions in the most charitable way) plus regarding adversarial situations as opportunities for personal growth.

The reason personal integrity is important for group coordination has to do with language. Language is the primary interface through which members of a group exchange information. Language must be reliably meaningful in order to be effective as a coordination mechanism, and the reliability of language depends on the integrity of the people using it.

For example, consider the story of the boy who cried wolf. This story is typically framed as a cautionary tale against compromising one’s own personal integrity by deceiving others. However, imagine a version of the story where the villagers do not know who exactly is crying wolf. Imagine that the only thing the villagers know is that someone is crying wolf even though there’s no actual wolf. In this version, the villagers do not lose trust in the boy. Instead, they lose trust in the word “wolf” itself. In this version of the story, not only is the boy’s lack of integrity compromising his own safety, it’s compromising the reliability of the word “wolf” as a signal and thereby compromising the safety of anyone who might encounter a wolf. Compromising the reliability of language compromises the ability of its users to coordinate.

The practice of reciprocal integrity is thus the maintenance of the reliability of language.

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