Altruistic punishment and between-group competition : evidence from n-person prisoner's dilemmas.

Susanne Rebers,Ruud Koopmans

doi:10.1007/s12110-012-9136-x

Abstract

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection. Previous research suggests that the costly punishment of group members who do not contribute to public goods plays an important role in the resolution of collective action dilemmas. If large-scale cooperation sustained by the punishment of defectors has evolved through the mechanism of cultural group selection, two implications regarding costly punishment follow: (1) that people are more willing to punish defecting group members in a situation of intergroup competition than in a single-group social dilemma game and (2) that levels of “perverse” punishment of cooperators are not affected by intergroup competition. We find confirmation for these hypotheses. However, we find that the effect of intergroup competition on the punishment of defectors is fully explained by the stronger conditionality of punishment on expected punishment levels in the competition condition.

Highlights

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection
A Mann-Whitney U-test showed that in line with Bornstein and Ben-Yossef (1994), and in line with our pilot experiment, there was no significant difference in cooperation levels between the two single-group conditions (U01005.500, p00.791). In contrast to these findings on the effects of intergroup competition in situations without punishment, we do not find a significant difference between the cooperation levels in single-group and competition conditions (U01977.500, p00.202)
In this experiment we found support for the two hypotheses that we derived from the direct intergroup competition variant of the cultural group selection perspective

Summary

Introduction

Collective action, or the large-scale cooperation in the pursuit of public goods, has been suggested to have evolved through cultural group selection. Previous research suggests that the costly punishment of group members who do not contribute to public goods plays an important role in the resolution of collective action dilemmas. Experimental research has shown that individuals are willing to punish group members (e.g., Fehr and Gächter 2000; Ostrom et al 1992; Yamagishi 1986), even in oneshot interactions (e.g., Shinada and Yamagishi 2007) Cooperation levels in both ethnographic experiments and social dilemma games are higher when punishment is possible than in similar situations or games without this possibility (e.g., Bochet et al 2006; Fehr and Gächter 2002; Heldt 2005b; Henrich et al 2006; Masclet et al 2003). The proportion of individuals with group-beneficial traits will increase in the global population (Boyd and Richerson 1982, 1985, 1990; Henrich and Boyd 2001)

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Conclusion