Do humans<i>really</i>punish altruistically? A closer look

Pedersen, Eric J.; Kurzban, Robert; McCullough, Michael E.

doi:10.1098/rspb.2012.2723

Cited by 114 publications

(124 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…For example, is it any more natural to ask players to respond to the decisions of others when there is no strategic reason to do so (1-6), or to punish anonymous individuals that they will never interact with again (35), or to report the number they privately roll on a dice to determine their payoff (36)? Laboratory studies are both advantageous, in that they allow precise control of the available incentives, and problematic, because they can remove important cues for natural behavior and because humans are not adapted for the laboratory (21,(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this interpretation would: (i) be inconsistent with other studies showing that people discriminate behaviorally, neurologically, and physiologically between humans and computers when playing simpler games (19,(56)(57)(58); (ii) not explain why behavior significantly correlated with understanding ( Fig. 2B and Tables S3 and S4); (iii) contradict the key assumption for theories of social preferences that players respond to the costs and benefits of the choices offered to them (59); and (iv) suggest that behavior reflects the payoffs of encounters in the real world, rather than the payoffs of the laboratory game (30,(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46). Such ingraining of behavior would suggest a major problem for the way in which economic games have been used to measure social preferences (38,41,42,60).…”

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confidence: 96%

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Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Burton-Chellew

Mouden

West

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

134

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Economic experiments are often used to study if humans altruistically value the welfare of others. A canonical result from public-good games is that humans vary in how they value the welfare of others, dividing into fair-minded conditional cooperators, who match the cooperation of others, and selfish noncooperators. However, an alternative explanation for the data are that individuals vary in their understanding of how to maximize income, with misunderstanding leading to the appearance of cooperation. We show that (i) individuals divide into the same behavioral types when playing with computers, whom they cannot be concerned with the welfare of; (ii) behavior across games with computers and humans is correlated and can be explained by variation in understanding of how to maximize income; (iii) misunderstanding correlates with higher levels of cooperation; and (iv) standard control questions do not guarantee understanding. These results cast doubt on certain experimental methods and demonstrate that a common assumption in behavioral economics experiments, that choices reveal motivations, will not necessarily hold.altruism | strategy method | inequity aversion | reciprocity | social preferences

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 96%

Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Burton-Chellew

Mouden

West

2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

117

134

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“…In such a case, the harm to the better-off is not a by-product of attaining some other good, but the good itself. When efficient, actors will even incur costs to effect such reductions in the welfare of positional rivals (49)(50)(51)(52). By hypothesis, this motivation to spitefully reduce the welfare of the better-off is orchestrated by the emotion of envy (53)(54)(55).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Sznycer

Seal

Sell

et al. 2017

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Why do people support economic redistribution? Hypotheses include inequity aversion, a moral sense that inequality is intrinsically unfair, and cultural explanations such as exposure to and assimilation of culturally transmitted ideologies. However, humans have been interacting with worse-off and better-off individuals over evolutionary time, and our motivational systems may have been naturally selected to navigate the opportunities and challenges posed by such recurrent interactions. We hypothesize that modern redistribution is perceived as an ancestral scene involving three notional players: the needy other, the better-off other, and the actor herself. We explore how three motivational systems-compassion, self-interest, and envy-guide responses to the needy other and the better-off other, and how they pattern responses to redistribution. Data from the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel support this model. Endorsement of redistribution is independently predicted by dispositional compassion, dispositional envy, and the expectation of personal gain from redistribution. By contrast, a taste for fairness, in the sense of (i) universality in the application of laws and standards, or (ii) low variance in group-level payoffs, fails to predict attitudes about redistribution.[M]ore recently the "Greatest happiness principle" has been brought prominently forward. It is, however, more correct to speak of the latter principle as the standard, and not as the motive of conduct.-Charles Darwin (1) W hy do people support social policies? One level of explanation addresses properties of populations that individual minds might process-local practices, shared beliefs and ideologies, collective identities, and recent history (2). A second, independent level of explanation asks which specific psychological mechanisms participate in forming the individual's response to a policy-that is, what interpretive, emotional, and motivational systems are activated by external inputs, shaping the response (3, 4). Here, we explore this second level of explanation. We investigate several evolved psychological mechanisms to see to what degree they pattern the individual's response to economic redistribution. We also investigate the extent to which a taste for fairness shapes support for redistribution.By economic redistribution, we mean the modification of a distribution of resources across a population as the result of a political process. In the case of progressive redistribution (henceforth, redistribution)-a policy for which there is large worldwide demand (5, 6)-the ostensible group-level goal is to even out a skewed statistical distribution by transferring resources from the better off to the less well off. However, it is possible that the public rationale for supporting a policy is distinct from the private or even nonconscious motives of individuals supporting (or opposing) it. It is important to recognize that such a transformation in the distribution of resources does not necessarily entail conservation of a fixed and ...

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“…Pedersen et al [11] maintain that many purported demonstrations of altruistic third-party punishment may be the result of experimental artefacts, as most third-party punishment experiments are associated with at least one of five common methodological problems. The first problem is limited behavioural choices-participants must choose whether to punish the unfair player or do nothing at all.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such altruistic third-party punishment has been observed among young children [6] and in many preliterate societies [7,8], let alone in conventional adult samples in modern societies. Nonetheless, some scholars recently cast serious doubt on the existence of altruistic punishment [10,11].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

Konishi

Ohtsubo

2015

Biol. Lett.

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Many experiments have demonstrated that people are willing to incur cost to punish norm violators even when they are not directly harmed by the violation. Such altruistic third-party punishment is often considered an evolutionary underpinning of large-scale human cooperation. However, some scholars argue that previously demonstrated altruistic third-party punishment against fairness-norm violations may be an experimental artefact. For example, envy-driven retaliatory behaviour (i.e. spite) towards better-off unfair game players may be misidentified as altruistic punishment. Indeed, a recent experiment demonstrated that participants ceased to inflict third-party punishment against an unfair player once a series of key methodological problems were systematically controlled for. Noticing that a previous finding regarding apparently altruistic third-party punishment against honesty-norm violations may have been subject to methodological issues, we used a different and what we consider to be a more sound design to evaluate these findings. Third-party punishment against dishonest players withstood this more stringent test.

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Do humansreallypunish altruistically? A closer look

Cited by 114 publications

References 43 publications

Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Conditional cooperation and confusion in public-goods experiments

Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

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