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Punish or perish? Retaliation and collaboration among humans

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A spate of recent investigations on reciprocation and social enforcement in humans has brought together (and sometimes divided) economists, psychologists, anthropologists, social scientists and evolutionary biologists, in addition to neurologists and students of animal behavior. Experimental work on public goods and social incentives has addressed a wealth of questions on the emotional and cognitive (proximal) factors, and also on the genetic and cultural (ultimate) evolutionary mechanisms involved in this essential aspect of human nature.

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Introduction: reciprocation and social enforcement

How do humans manage to sustain collective efforts in sizable groups of unrelated individuals? This topic is in fashion but not new. In 1975, for instance, W.D. Hamilton closed his essay on ‘Innate Social Aptitudes of Man’ [1] with a section on ‘Reciprocation and Social Enforcement’. Humans have a special gift for reciprocation. However, in interactions involving more than two individuals, reciprocation works less well than in pairwise encounters. Even defining it is a non-trivial task. If your

Fining free-riders

Let us begin with an experimental ‘public good’ game. Six anonymous players are given $10 each. They must decide whether to invest this in a common pool, knowing that the experimenter will triple the amount in the common pool, and distribute it equally among all six players, irrespective of whether they contributed.

This game is easy to analyze. If all players contribute, they triple their endowments. However, each player is better off by not contributing because only half of the contribution

Sanctions and social dilemmas

The investigation of the interplay between mutual assistance and social enforcement is a booming enterprise. Economists use experimental games to study the effects of positive and negative incentives (i.e. reward and punishment) on our propensity to collaborate 6, 7; anthropologists visit small-scale societies to measure the culture dependence and universality of norms that enforce cooperation [8]; psychologists study the often subconscious cues eliciting emotions that lead to helping behavior

Ultimate reasons of costly punishment

Altruistic behavior and selfish genes provide a favorite playground for theories on the evolution of cooperation, and have led to a rich toolbox (Box 2). Does this toolbox offer an explanation for our propensity to punish cheaters in public good interactions? How can the trait emerge, and how can it be maintained (Box 3)?

Two evolutionary approaches to these questions are based on group selection, and invoke selective group extinction 29, 30. It seems likely that intergroup conflict was frequent

Proximate causes of costly punishment

It makes no sense to assume that ultimatum games or public good games, in their clinical sterility, have shaped our evolution, although human behavior in these games is based on evolved traits. The stark artificiality of economic experiments helps (as in physics or physiology) to reveal the mechanisms underlying these traits.

It seems from cross-cultural studies that the readiness to inflict costly punishment on cheaters is a human universal [8]. It varies across societies but is strongly

The limitations of peer-punishment

Although punishment works to boost cooperation, it can also be counterproductive. It often lowers the average income in public good games, despite raising the average level of contributions. In games of trust, or games involving rewards, adding the threat of punishment can decrease the menaced player's willingness to cooperate [60]. In a particularly elegant set of experiments, it has been shown that, if players of a public good game are offered before each round the choice between the versions

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Hannelore Brandt, Robert Boyd, Daniel Fessler, Simon Gächter, Manfred Milinski, Mayuko Nakamaru, Martin Nowak and Bettina Rockenbach for helpful discussions. This work was funded by EUROCORES TECT I–104–G15.

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