Abstract
Why did punishment and the use of reputation evolve in humans? According to one family of theories, they evolved to support the maintenance of cooperative group norms; according to another, they evolved to enhance personal gains from cooperation. Current behavioral data are consistent with both hypotheses (and both selection pressures could have shaped human cooperative psychology). However, these hypotheses lead to sharply divergent behavioral predictions in circumstances that have not yet been tested. Here we report results testing these rival predictions. In every test where social exchange theory and group norm maintenance theory made different predictions, subject behavior violated the predictions of group norm maintenance theory and matched those of social exchange theory. Subjects do not direct punishment toward those with reputations for norm violation per se; instead, they use reputation self-beneficially, as a cue to lower the risk that they personally will experience losses from defection. More tellingly, subjects direct their cooperative efforts preferentially towards defectors they have punished and away from those they haven’t punished; they avoid expending punitive effort on reforming defectors who only pose a risk to others. These results are not consistent with the hypothesis that the psychology of punishment evolved to uphold group norms. The circumstances in which punishment is deployed and withheld–its circuit logic–support the hypothesis that it is generated by psychological mechanisms that evolved to benefit the punisher, by allowing him to bargain for better treatment.
Highlights
Evolutionary biologists and economists have long recognized that, under some conditions, cooperative strategies yield large fitness payoffs [1,2,3]
We present two experiments designed so that Social Exchange and Group Norm Maintenance theories produce sharply divergent predictions–that is, where key behavioral measures will be different in direction, and not in magnitude, depending on which evolved strategies are implemented in the human cooperative architecture
The two studies replicate each other’s core findings, but they do so using very different forms of reputation–the partner’s own disclosure of his or her willingness to cheat in several real-world scenarios (Study 1) and the partner’s behavior in response to Prisoner’s Dilemmas (Study 2)
Summary
Evolutionary biologists and economists have long recognized that, under some conditions, cooperative strategies yield large fitness payoffs (e.g., gains in trade, risk pooling) [1,2,3]. Over the last two decades, there has been a growing consensus among biologists, psychologists, economists, and cognitive neuroscientists that humans have evolved decision-making specializations designed to capture these cooperative payoffs [4,5,6]. This hypothesis is supported by an increasingly diverse body of experimental [5,7,8,9,10,11] and neuroscientific [12,13,14,15] evidence. We report experiments that critically test two major surviving theories of human cooperation against each other, by testing conflicting hypotheses about the cues the cognitive architecture uses and the behavioral outputs that it produces
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