Organizations cannot make significant gains unless some individuals within the organization take significant personal risks that catalyze effective collective action. The authors show that these individuals - whom they call 'Consistent Contributors' -- can change other group members' perceptions by modeling cooperative behavior, thereby increasing the chances for additional cooperation. These individuals, they explain, always contribute, regardless of others' choices. They describe their research findings, which indicate that characterizing consistent contributors as 'suckers' is both misleading and fallacious: indeed, their data leads them to believe that consistent contributors are actually 'saviors' rather than suckers. A serious challenge for managers, then, is the creation of contexts that encourage and support the emergence and recognition of Consistent Contributors.

Despite engaging with other people on a regular basis, individuals vary significantly in their willingness to trust. For some, trusting intentions are central to their conceptions of their social selves; while for others, the social world takes second place to their individually-motivated concerns. Despite these differences, extrinsic motivations (i.e., the tangible benefits that result from trusting) provide strong motivations to establish mutual trust and/or mutually-trusting reciprocal actions. The authors present the Motivated Attributions Model, with explains the conditions under which acts of trust are most likely. One immediate implication of their Model is for individuals in potentially-trusting relationships to seriously consider the effects of their motivations, their dependencies, their need to see themselves positively, and their inability to fully understand their counterparts' perceptions.