Abstract
Punishment plays an important role in promoting cooperation. In real society, individuals tend to punish other players based on certain conditions rather than punish them directly. Thus, we introduce a conditional neutral punishment mechanism and study how this mechanism affects the evolution of cooperation. Namely, an individual can punish his/her neighbors with the opposite strategy when his/her payoff is lower than the average payoff of his/her neighbors. The simulation results show that this mechanism promotes cooperation effectively even with antisocial punishment. By adopting such a mechanism, cooperative punishers form shields to protect cooperators inside, while defective punishers hide behind defectors without punishing anyone.
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