Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Abstract

Punishments for norm violations are hypothesized to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely nonindustrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape, or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material, or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modeling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society.

Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies

“…Punishment reinforces teaching opaque cultural norms. Across diverse societies, punishment serves to correct behavior that deviates from accepted norms and reinforces the importance of adhering to these norms [73][74][75] . Whiting 76 (p. 68) explains the important role of punishment in teaching proper, prosocial behavior and deference towards elders among the Northern Paiute children in the Great Basin region of Western North America:…”

Rebels with a cause? How norm violations shape dominance, prestige, and influence granting

“…Alternatively, community norm violators may be frowned upon because their behavior jeopardizes societal functioning and harmony, notions that are valued comparatively more in interdependent cultures [111]. Moreover, it is conceivable that the patterns we uncovered here are modulated by other aspects of the socio-economic system within which norm violations occur, such as egalitarianism versus social stratification and the role the violated norm plays in society [112]. Cross-cultural investigations of the effects of global community norm violations versus local group norm violations could further enhance understanding of when norm violators gain influence.…”

Social substitutability across features of human socioecology

“…It is possible that norms of social substitutability could be subject to Galton's problem of non-independence, shared cultural ancestry explaining the cross-cultural distribution of these norms. Recent comparative ethnographic analysis, however, on norm violations and punishment employing a phylogenetic modeling approach failed to find strong effects of phylogeny predicting cross-societal variation in types of punishment, suggesting punishment systems evolve relatively rapidly and variation is not well captured by cultural ancestry (Garfield et al, 2023) .…”