'Altruistic' and 'Antisocial' Punishers are One and the Same

Abstract

'Altruistic' and 'antisocial' punishers are one and the same AbstractIn certain economic experiments, some participants willingly pay a cost to punish peers who contribute too little to the public good. Because such punishment can lead to improved group outcomes, this costly punishment has been conceived of as altruistic. Here we provide evidence that individual variation in the propensity to punish low contributions is unrelated to altruism. First, individual use of punishment was uncorrelated with contribution to the public good, contrary to the hypothesis that punishers are proximally motivated by prosocial preferences. Second, individual use of punishment was positively correlated across situations where the use of punishment is typically group beneficial and situations where the use of punishment is typically group detrimental, as well as across situations of radically different strategic structures. These findings contrast sharply with the premise that the tendency to use punishment can fruitfully be regarded as an adaptation for solving social dilemmas.Keywords. public goods, costly punishment, cooperation, altruism 4 Economic experiments have shown that people use costly punishment in public goods games more frequently than is expected from rational optimizers of financial gain (1-3).Often, though not always, this punishment is directed at those who have made low contributions to the public good. While contributions to the public good diminish over time in the absence of punishment, the addition of costly punishment, contingent on the particular usage of that punishment, can induce and sustain cooperation. Thus punishment, in some cases, appears to solve the first order social dilemma of the public goods game. This finding has inspired an "altruistic" punishment hypothesis: human cooperation in social dilemmas is explained, in part, by the prevalence of individuals predisposed by evolution to pay the costs of punishing non-cooperators and thus sustain cooperation. Here we provide direct tests of both a motivational and an instrumental interpretation of the "altruistic" punishment hypotheses namely: i) Punishment is directly motivated by prosocial preferences. ii)Regardless of proximal motivation, individual propensity to punish is a (cultural) group level adaptation specifically for solving collective action problems.Under the motivational interpretation of the altruistic punishment hypothesis, punishment of low contributors should be correlated with other behaviors that are motivated by prosocial preferences. Although general patterns of behavior in the public goods game can be understood without invoking prosocial preferences (4), individual differences in contributions to the public good when there is no threat of punishment are related to individual differences in prosocial preferences (5). Therefore, within groups playing a public goods game the motivational interpretation of the altruistic punishment hypothesis predicts individual

Dispositional free riders do not free ride on punishment

“…This interpretation is consistent with Yamagishi et al 41 who find that rejections of unfair offers in ultimatum games are unrelated to prosocial cooperation in trust games and prisoner’s dilemma games. It is also consistent with experimental 34 , 40 , 42 and survey-based evidence 38 , 39 showing that behavioural measures consistent with strong positive and negative reciprocity are unrelated. Our experiments, which separate cooperative dispositions from behaviour, show that otherwise self-regarding people are therefore suddenly willing to bear the cost of disciplining wrongdoers, even in the absence of personal benefits for doing so.…”

“…As explained above, existing evidence in seeming support of the hypothesis of a positive correlation of strong positive and negative reciprocity—and also against it 38 – 42 —does not, with exceptions 33 – 35 , control for beliefs and expectations about others’ behaviour when determining dispositions towards cooperation. The current work makes a distinction between agents’ intrinsic disposition towards (first-order) cooperation and their actual cooperative behaviour in the presence of punishment, by employing a two-phase experimental design.…”

Punishment: one tool, many uses

“…Prediction 1: Punishers should also be cooperative individuals In many models, the tendency to punish defectors is assumed to be linked to the tendency to cooperate, meaning that a punisher can also be assumed to be a cooperator (although the reverse is not necessarily true; Andrés Guzmán et al 2007;Bowles and Gintis 2004;Boyd et al 2003;Boyd and Richerson 1992;Henrich and Boyd 2001, but see Huang et al 2018;Eriksson et al 2014;Lehmann et al 2007;Úbeda and Duéñez-Guzmán 2011). This assumption has also been described in terms of a psychological propensity to behave as a strong reciprocator (an individual that has a preference to conditionally cooperate and to punish non-cooperators; Gintis 2000).…”

A New Look at Individual Differences in Perceptions of Unfairness: The Theory of Maximally Unfair Allocations in Multiparty Situations

“…In particular, emotional reactions to winners and losers may trigger various positive and negative sanctions. Experimental research on use of sanctions following contributions to a public good indicates that individual variation in use of sanctions is not predicted by a single measure of prosociality (Eriksson et al, 2014). It may therefore be a very promising line of research to study individual variation in sanctioning behavior in social dilemmas using the MUA framework.…”