Abstract
Punishment offers a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies, but the maintenance of costly punishment itself remains problematic. Game theory has shown that corruption, where punishers can defect without being punished themselves, may sustain cooperation. However, in many human societies and some insect ones, high levels of cooperation coexist with low levels of corruption, and such societies show greater wellbeing than societies with high corruption. Here we show that small payments from cooperators to punishers can destabilize corrupt societies and lead to the spread of punishment without corruption (righteousness). Righteousness can prevail even in the face of persistent power inequalities. The resultant righteous societies are highly stable and have higher wellbeing than corrupt ones. This result may help to explain the persistence of costly punishing behavior, and indicates that corruption is a sub-optimal tool for maintaining cooperation in human societies.
Highlights
The role of punishment in maintaining cooperative societies has attracted considerable attention from theorists [1,2,3,4,5,6], and their findings may have far-reaching implications for the social sciences
When ev0, righteousness is globally unstable, and the dynamics lead to either defection or corruption, which is qualitatively equivalent to the Corruption Game
One is either zK or zCK, which we will refer to as corruption, and either zH or zHK which we will refer to as righteousness
Summary
The role of punishment in maintaining cooperative societies has attracted considerable attention from theorists [1,2,3,4,5,6], and their findings may have far-reaching implications for the social sciences. Ubeda and Duenez-Guzman [20], found that corruption could sometimes increase the net wellbeing of the population (that is, the cumulative payoff of individuals) This occurred because defecting punishers could maintain cooperation in a non-punishing subpopulation that would otherwise defect. We explore how such small benefits to punishers affect the maintenance of cooperation and the evolution of corruption and righteousness These payments avoid most components of a reputation system, where individuals decide whom to cooperate with based on information about past interactions received from others [47,48,49]. Punishers can often be identified by cultural tags such as uniforms even in the absence of individual recognition, and payments can be conferred via taxation systems without any need for individual observation
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