Costly Punishment Across Human Societies

Abstract

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

Variations in judgments of intentional action and moral evaluation across eight cultures

“…Culture may influence judgments of intentional action not only by defining what acts are considered helpful versus harmful, but also perhaps by setting the threshold for how negative outcomes or agents must be before they are considered blameworthy (Alicke et al, 2008). Our findings may also call to question the assumption that transculturally, punitive measures carry higher instrumental value than reward (Henrich et al, 2006). That some cultures differentially emphasize praise over punishment may be consistent with an emerging literature demonstrating cultural variation in the tendency to engage in punitive versus restorative justice following violation of a fairness norm (Robbins & Rochat, 2011).…”

Punish or perish? Retaliation and collaboration among humans

“…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 sub-conscious cues eliciting emotions that lead to helping behaviour or moralistic aggression [9][10][11]; neurologists use magnetic resonance techniques to correlate social dilemmas with brain activities [12,13]; game theorists modify their utility functions to take account of non-monetary concerns [14,15]; biologists look for signs of policing and sanctions in bees or bacteria [16,17]; and political scientists attempt to improve governance of institutions promoting collective actions [18,19]. Trans-disciplinary dialogues are in full swing, although communication sometimes needs improving [20].…”

“…In particular, in all 'modern' societies, some two-thirds of the offers are between 40% and 50% of the total sum; those <20% are few, and get usually rejected [26]. A vast collective effort of anthropological studies [8] was able to document cultural variation in small-scale societies: but even among the Machiguenga, an Amazonian population of hunter-gatherers, the mean offer was 26%; this record of unfairness is still a long way from the minimal offer predicted for selfish agents.…”

“…It appears 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 correlated with altruistic behaviour, such as the readiness to help others in Dictator games.…”

The mentalizing network orchestrates the impact of parochial altruism on social norm enforcement

“…A key element of the enforcement of many social norms, such as food-sharing norms in hunter-gatherer societies [Hill, 2002;Kaplan et al, 2000], is that people punish norm violators not only for direct transgressions against the punisher himself (termed second-party punishment), but also for norm violations against others (termed third-party punishment) [Bendor and Swistak, 2001;Sober and Wilson, 1998]. Norm enforcement requires that even third parties-who are neither economically, physically, nor psychologically affected by the violations-be willing to punish [Fehr and Fischbacher, 2004b;Henrich et al, 2006]. Thus, third-party punishment greatly enhances the scope for norms that regulate human behavior.…”