Abstract
Peer punishment is widely considered a key mechanism supporting cooperation in human groups. Although much research shows that human behavior is shaped by the prevailing social norms, little is known about how punishment decisions are impacted by the social context. We present a set of large-scale incentivized experiments in which participants (N=999) could punish their partner conditional on either the level of cooperation or the level of punishment displayed by others who previously interacted in the same setting. While many participants punish independently of levels of cooperation or punishment, a substantial portion punishes free riding more severely when cooperation is more common (‘norm enforcement’), or when free riding is more severely punished by others (‘conformist punishment’). With a dynamic model we demonstrate that conditional punishment strategies can substantially promote cooperation. In particular, conformist punishment helps cooperation to gain a foothold in a population, and norm enforcement helps to maintain cooperation at high levels. Our results provide solid empirical evidence of conditional punishment strategies and illustrate their possible implications for the dynamics of human cooperation.
Highlights
Communities, and society as a whole to function, individuals often have to engage in activities that are costly for them selves, but beneficial for others
We find that norm enforcement and conformist punishment play markedly different roles in promoting cooperation: conformist punishment can effectively pro mote the establishment of cooperation in a population, whereas norm enforcement is effective at maintaining cooperation at high levels
The average intensity of punishment had a stronger impact on average punishment (Fig. 1b; P < 0.001; Table A2, Model 2). We interpret this as evidence that the social context impacts peer punish ment, with both descriptive norms of cooperation and descriptive norms of punishment modulating people’s overall willingness to punish defectors
Summary
Communities, and society as a whole to function, individuals often have to engage in activities that are costly for them selves, but beneficial for others. When studying the drivers of peer punishment, laboratory studies typically focus on aspects specific to the interaction at hand, such as peers’ cooperation decisions, the cost and impact of punishment, or the potential for future interaction or retaliation (Cam era & Casari, 2009; Egas & Riedl, 2008; Fehr & Gachter, 2000; Gachter, Kolle, & Quercia, 2017; Nikiforakis, 2010; Raihani & Bshary, 2019) In doing so, these studies generally abstract away from the broader social context in which an interaction takes place. Because soci eties differ from each other in myriad ways, such cross-cultural com parisons have limited ability to identify exactly which aspects of the social context underlie any observed differences
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