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Tem42 comments on Suffering - Less Wrong
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I will help a suffering thing if it benefits me to help it, or if the social contract requires me to. Otherwise I will walk away.
I adopted this cruel position after going through one long relationship where I constantly demanded emotional "help" from the girl, then another relationship soon afterwards where the girl constantly demanded similar "help" from me. Both those situations felt so sick that I finally understood: participating in any guilt-trip scenario makes you a worse person, no matter whether you're tripping or being tripped. And it also makes the world worse off: being openly vulnerable to guilt-tripping encourages more guilt-tripping all around.
So relax and follow your own utility - this will incentivize others to incentivize you to help them, so everyone will treat you well, and you'll treat them well in advance for the same reason.
This differs from what I had hypothesized was the standard model. I think I like my hypothesis of the standard model better than my understanding of your model, so I'll mention it here, on the off-chance that you might also like it.
I think that most people make (or intuit) the calculation "If it's not too much trouble, I should help this person one time. If they are appropriately thankful, and if they do not inconvenience me too much, I will consider helping them again; if they reciprocate appropriately, I will probably be friends with them, and engage in a long-term reciprocal relationship."
In this calculation, 'appropriately thankful', 'inconvenience me too much', and 'reciprocate appropriately' are highly subjective, but this model appears to account for most stable relationships. It also accounts for guilt-trip based relationships being unstable. The "I should help one time" clause may make the world a better place in general, although it is unclear if that's why most people hold it.
It is possible that when you say "social contract" and I say "reciprocal relationship", we mean exactly the same thing.