Abstract
Prosocial third-party punishment (3PP) is a punitive behavior against antisocial individuals, which might explain extended cooperativeness in humans. 3PP shows sexual dimorphism, being more frequent in men than in women. We studied whether sexually dimorphic features related to sexual hormones during development (facial dimorphism and 2D:4D) influence the tendency to engage in 3PP in a sample of 511 women and 328 men. After playing a Prisoner’s Dilemma, participants had to decide whether to penalize the defection of a third player who had exploited his/her counterpart’s cooperation. In line with previous studies, we observe that men are more prone to engage in 3PP than women. We find that this sex difference is due to cooperative men being more likely to punish than cooperative women. In addition, men with higher facial masculinity are less likely to engage in 3PP, whereas no features influence 3PP in women. We discuss the possibility that sex differences in the motivations and fitness implications underlying 3PP might be driving the observed results.
Highlights
Third party punishment (3PP) is a behavior costly to the individual exerting it and aimed at penalizing individuals who have not directly interacted with the punisher
We explore whether physiology related variables influence altruistic 3PP in the context of a social dilemma, the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG), and whether these variables can explain the sex differences observed in this form of punishment
We found significant differences (Table 1) in facial dimorphism and self-perceived attractiveness (SPA)
Summary
Third party punishment (3PP) is a behavior costly to the individual exerting it and aimed at penalizing individuals who have not directly interacted with the punisher. Our aim in this work is to study for the first time how features related to individual development influence the tendency to engage in altruistic 3PP in the context of a social dilemma. Cooperative behavior is affected by the levels of sexual hormones to which an individual is exposed during development[21,22,26,40,41,42] Their influence is due to their organizational effects during this period, in which they conform and modify the anatomy and physiology of growing organisms[43,44], including the nervous system[45]. The exposure to sexual hormones during these periods can be proxied with two widely-used morphological features: the second-to-fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) and facial masculinity/femininity[46,47]
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