Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups

Boyd, Robert; Richerson, Peter J.

doi:10.1016/0162-3095(92)90032-y

Cited by 1,193 publications

(893 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Existing work with adults is inconclusive on this point, with some work indicating that rewards sustain secondorder cooperation and other work suggesting that punishment does (see, e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1992;Henrich & Boyd, 2001;Kiyonari & Barclay, 2008;Nelissen, 2008). Our study design cannot tease these possibilities apart as we compared children's responses to enforcers versus non-enforcers.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

et al. 2016

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a b s t r a c tLarge-scale human cooperation among unrelated individuals requires the enforcement of social norms. However, such enforcement poses a problem because non-enforcers can free ride on others' costly and risky enforcement. One solution is that enforcers receive benefits relative to non-enforcers. Here we show that this solution becomes functional during the preschool years: 5-year-old (but not 4-year-old) children judged enforcers of norms more positively, preferred enforcers, and distributed more resources to enforcers than to non-enforcers. The ability to sustain not only first-order but also second-order cooperation thus emerges quite early in human ontogeny, providing a viable solution to the problem of higherorder cooperation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

et al. 2016

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“…Quite the opposite. Without special mechanisms such as punishment or ostracism, single defections or known endpoints for cooperation can lead to the immediate dissolution of a coalition (e.g., Boyd and Richerson 1992;Gintis 2000).…”

Section: Selection Pressures Coalition Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Hagen

Bryant

2003

Hum Nat

383

339

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Evidence suggests that humans might have neurological specializations for music processing, but a compelling adaptationist account of music and dance is lacking. The sexual selection hypothesis cannot easily account for the widespread performance of music and dance in groups (especially synchronized performances), and the social bonding hypothesis has severe theoretical difficulties. Humans are unique among the primates in their ability to form cooperative alliances between groups in the absence of consanguineal ties. We propose that this unique form of social organization is predicated on music and dance. Music and dance may have evolved as a coalition signaling system that could, among other things, credibly communicate coalition quality, thus permitting meaningful cooperative relationships between groups. This capability may have evolved from coordinated territorial defense signals that are common in many social species, including chimpanzees. We present a study in which manipulation of music synchrony significantly altered subjects' perceptions of music quality, and in which subjects' perceptions of music quality were correlated with their perceptions of coalition quality, supporting our hypothesis. Our hypothesis also has implications for the evolution of psychological mechanisms underlying cultural production in other domains such as food

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“…In contrast to many evolutionary IPD models, our partner selection approach does not fix the probability (o) that a relationship between two partners will continue to the next round (Axelrod and Hamilton, 1981;Boyd and Richerson, 1992;Brown et al, 1982). Rather, in our model interactions end 'naturally' as the result of changing partner preferences, the death of partners, and the end of the simulation.…”

Section: Distribution Of Relationship Durationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Friendship, cliquishness, and the emergence of cooperation

Hruschka

Henrich

2006

Journal of Theoretical Biology

102

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The evolution of cooperation is a central problem in biology and the social sciences. While theoretical work using the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) has shown that cooperation among non-kin can be sustained among reciprocal strategies (i.e. tit-for-tat), these results are sensitive to errors in strategy execution, cyclical invasions by free riders, and the specific ecology of strategies. Moreover, the IPD assumes that a strategy's probability of playing the PD game with other individuals is independent of the decisions made by others. Here, we remove the assumption of independent pairing by studying a more plausible cooperative dilemma in which players can preferentially interact with a limited set of known partners and also deploy longer-term accounting strategies that can counteract the effects of random errors. We show that cooperative strategies readily emerge and persist in a range of noisy environments, with successful cooperative strategies (henceforth, cliquers) maintaining medium-term memories for partners and low thresholds for acceptable cooperation (i.e. forgiveness). The success of these strategies relies on their cliquishness-a propensity to defect with strangers if they already have an adequate number of partners. Notably, this combination of medium-term accounting, forgiveness, and cliquishness fits with empirical studies of friendship and other long-term relationships among humans. r

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Punishment allows the evolution of cooperation (or anything else) in sizable groups

Cited by 1,193 publications

References 19 publications

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

Preschoolers value those who sanction non-cooperators

Music and dance as a coalition signaling system

Friendship, cliquishness, and the emergence of cooperation

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