Altruistic Punishment Research Articles

A cooperation guarantee mechanism based on altruistic punishment for nodes in distributed environments

Aiming at non-cooperation behaviours in highly distributed environments such as P2P systems, researchers have presented many algorithms and mechanisms based on traditional economic theories. The hypothesis of rational man is the basic assumption in traditional economic theories. The hypothesis means that any man is a rational man who is selfish and desires to maximise his needs or desires. However, researches on behaviour economics have proved by many demonstrations that the assumption of rational man is defective. Research achievements in demotics and other fields find that humans have a predisposition to punish those who violate group-beneficial norms, even when this imposes a fitness cost on the punisher. Based on the altruistic punishment, we present a whole new mechanism considering both rational nodes and irrational nodes in distributed environments reference from rational man and irrational man in social area without central controller. A mechanism based on altruistic punishment is proposed to improve the cooperation degree. Theory analysis and simulation results prove the ration and validity of this paper.

Bicycle Backlash: Qualitative Examination of Aggressive Driver–Bicyclist Interactions

This research investigated aggressive driver–bicyclist interactions. Individuals who identified themselves as both a driver and a bicyclist were asked about their behavior when they encountered a bicyclist on the road while they were driving a car. Open-ended survey responses were analyzed from individuals who reported a propensity for driving too closely to a bicyclist who they felt was not staying to the side of the road. The data were drawn from a snowball-sampled, online survey specifically targeted to elicit responses about rare (i.e., deviant or illegal) behaviors. Little research exists on why individuals would choose to intimidate a bicyclist while they were driving. Applicable theories from sociology and behavioral economics (i.e., theories of crime as social control and as altruistic punishment) were drawn on in this study to help understand why individuals might do so. This paper argues that aggressive driving behavior directed at bicyclists in the sample population could be characterized with two general themes: “teaching them a lesson” and “they had it coming.” In both cases, individuals deflected the blame for their aggressive behavior away from themselves. Instead, they cast themselves as serving a social good by teaching bicyclists how they should behave or by punishing bicyclists for behaving in ways with which the drivers disagreed. The study reported here was an initial step in an effort to identify testable hypotheses through qualitative methods to explain such behaviors and eventually to mitigate them. The intent is to inform actionable directions to address dangerous on-street interactions that act as barriers to a safe transportation system that accommodates all users.

Nationalism and Social Sanctioning Across Ethnic Lines: Experimental Evidence from the Kenya–Tanzania Border

AbstractPast research shows that ethnic diversity reduces the ability to sanction norm violators, ultimately undermining cooperation. We test this directly by experimentally varying the ethnic composition of groups playing a dictator game with third-party punishment among two ethnic groups along the Kenya–Tanzania border. We also implement a structurally identical game where the endowment division is randomly determined in order to isolate a punishment motivation from the motivation to rectify income inequality. While costly income adjustment in both games is driven primarily by norm violations and inequality aversion, the ethnic composition of groups also influences sharing and sanctioning behavior in Kenya but not Tanzania, consistent with documented differences in the strength of nationalism across the two countries. However, the way in which shared ethnicity affects sanctioning in Kenya—namely, increased punishment of out-group violations against in-group members—is at odds with theories that anticipate that costly sanctioning will primarily target coethnics.

Oxytocin modulates third-party sanctioning of selfish and generous behavior within and between groups

Human groups function because members trust each other and reciprocate cooperative contributions, and reward others’ cooperation and punish their non-cooperation. Here we examined the possibility that such third-party punishment and reward of others’ trust and reciprocation is modulated by oxytocin, a neuropeptide generally involved in social bonding and in-group (but not out-group) serving behavior. Healthy males and females (N=100) self-administered a placebo or 24 IU of oxytocin in a randomized, double-blind, between-subjects design. Participants were asked to indicate (incentivized, costly) their level of reward or punishment for in-group (outgroup) investors donating generously or fairly to in-group (outgroup) trustees, who back-transferred generously, fairly or selfishly. Punishment (reward) was higher for selfish (generous) investments and back-transfers when (i) investors were in-group rather than outgroup, and (ii) trustees were in-group rather than outgroup, especially when (iii) participants received oxytocin rather than placebo. It follows, first, that oxytocin leads individuals to ignore out-groups as long as out-group behavior is not relevant to the in-group and, second, that oxytocin contributes to creating and enforcing in-group norms of cooperation and trust.

Group Membership Modulates the Neural Circuitry Underlying Third Party Punishment.

This research aims to explore the neural correlates involved in altruistic punishment, parochial altruism and anti-social punishment, using the Third-Party Punishment (TPP) game. In particular, this study considered these punishment behaviors in in-group vs. out-group game settings, to compare how people behave with members of their own national group and with members of another national group. The results showed that participants act altruistically to protect in-group members. This study indicates that norm violation in in-group (but not in out-group) settings results in increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junction, brain regions involved in the mentalizing network, as the third-party attempts to understand or justify in-group members’ behavior. Finally, exploratory analysis during anti-social punishment behavior showed brain activation recruitment of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with altered regulation of emotions.

Altruistic punishment does not increase with the severity of norm violations in the field.

The degree of human cooperation among strangers is a major evolutionary puzzle. A prominent explanation is that cooperation is maintained because many individuals have a predisposition to punish those violating group-beneficial norms. A critical condition for cooperation to evolve in evolutionary models is that punishment increases with the severity of the violation. Here we present evidence from a field experiment with real-life interactions that, unlike in lab experiments, altruistic punishment does not increase with the severity of the violation, regardless of whether it is direct (confronting a violator) or indirect (withholding help). We also document growing concerns for counter-punishment as the severity of the violation increases, indicating that the marginal cost of direct punishment increases with the severity of violations. The evidence suggests that altruistic punishment may not provide appropriate incentives to deter large violations. Our findings thus offer a rationale for the emergence of formal institutions for promoting large-scale cooperation among strangers.

Face-to-Face Sharing with Strangers and Altruistic Punishment of Acquaintances for Strangers: Young Adolescents Exhibit Greater Altruism than Adults.

Young adolescents are generally considered to be self-absorbed. Studies indicate that they lack relevant general cognitive abilities, such as impulse control, that mature in early adulthood. However, their idealism may cause them to be more intolerant of unfair treatment to others and thus result in their engaging in more altruistic behavior. The present study aimed to clarify whether young adolescents are more altruistic than adults and thus indicate whether altruistic competence is domain-specific. One hundred 22 young adolescents and adults participated in a face-to-face, two-round, third-party punishment experiment. In each interaction group, a participant served as an allocator who could share money units with a stranger; another participant who knew the allocator could punish the acquaintance for the stranger. Participants reported their emotions after the first round, and at the end of the experiment, the participants justified their behavior in each round. The results indicated that the young adolescents both shared more and punished more than did the adults. Sharing was associated with a reference to fairness in the justifications, but altruistic punishment was associated with subsequent positive emotion. In sum, greater altruism in young adolescents compared to adults with mature cognitive abilities provides evidence of domain-specificity of altruistic competence. Moreover, sharing and altruistic punishment are related to specific cognitive and emotional mechanisms, respectively.

Costly punishment in the ultimatum game evokes moral concern, in particular when framed as payoff reduction

The ultimatum game is a common economic experiment in which some participants reject another's unfair offer of how to split some money, even though it leaves them both worse off. This costly behavior can be seen as enforcement of a fairness norm and has been labeled “altruistic punishment”, suggesting that it is a moral thing to do. But is this behavior viewed as moral by participants? Is it viewed as punishment? And are the payoff consequences of the behavior sufficient to determine the answers to these questions? To investigate this we framed costly punishment in two different ways: either as rejection of an offer (the standard ultimatum game framing) or as reduction of payoff. In a series of paid and hypothetical experiments we found that moral concerns about costly punishment depended on the framing. Specifically, the reduction frame elicited more moral concern about, and less use of, costly punishment than did the rejection frame. Several implications are discussed.

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using fMRI, here we implement a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision that were conflated in previous studies of third-party punishment. Behaviorally, the punishment decision is primarily defined by a superadditive interaction between harm and mental state, with subjects weighing the interaction factor more than the single factors of harm and mental state. On a neural level, evaluation of harms engaged brain areas associated with affective and somatosensory processing, whereas mental state evaluation primarily recruited circuitry involved in mentalization. Harm and mental state evaluations are integrated in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate structures, with the amygdala acting as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the time of the decision to assign an appropriate punishment through a distributed coding system. Together, these findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties render punishment decisions. Punishment undergirds large-scale cooperation and helps dispense criminal justice. Yet it is currently unknown precisely how people assess the mental states of offenders, evaluate the harms they caused, and integrate those two components into a single punishment decision. Using a new design, we isolated these three processes, identifying the distinct brain systems and activities that enable each. Additional findings suggest that the amygdala plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction of mental state and harm information, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a crucial, final-stage role, both in integrating mental state and harm information and in selecting a suitable punishment amount. These findings deepen our understanding of how punishment decisions are made, which may someday help to improve them.

How chimpanzees cooperate in a competitive world

Our species is routinely depicted as unique in its ability to achieve cooperation, whereas our closest relative, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), is often characterized as overly competitive. Human cooperation is assisted by the cost attached to competitive tendencies through enforcement mechanisms, such as punishment and partner choice. To examine if chimpanzees possess the same ability to mitigate competition, we set up a cooperative task in the presence of the entire group of 11 adults, which required two or three individuals to pull jointly to receive rewards. This open-group set-up provided ample opportunity for competition (e.g., freeloading, displacements) and aggression. Despite this unique set-up and initial competitiveness, cooperation prevailed in the end, being at least five times as common as competition. The chimpanzees performed 3,565 cooperative acts while using a variety of enforcement mechanisms to overcome competition and freeloading, as measured by (attempted) thefts of rewards. These mechanisms included direct protest by the target, third-party punishment in which dominant individuals intervened against freeloaders, and partner choice. There was a marked difference between freeloading and displacement; freeloading tended to elicit withdrawal and third-party interventions, whereas displacements were met with a higher rate of direct retaliation. Humans have shown similar responses in controlled experiments, suggesting shared mechanisms across the primates to mitigate competition for the sake of cooperation.

Social image concerns promote cooperation more than altruistic punishment.

Human cooperation is enigmatic, as organisms are expected, by evolutionary and economic theory, to act principally in their own interests. However, cooperation requires individuals to sacrifice resources for each other's benefit. We conducted a series of novel experiments in a foraging society where social institutions make the study of social image and punishment particularly salient. Participants played simple cooperation games where they could punish non-cooperators, promote a positive social image or do so in combination with one another. We show that although all these mechanisms raise cooperation above baseline levels, only when social image alone is at stake do average economic gains rise significantly above baseline. Punishment, either alone or combined with social image building, yields lower gains. Individuals' desire to establish a positive social image thus emerges as a more decisive factor than punishment in promoting human cooperation.

The Emerging Neuroscience of Third-Party Punishment

Although it is far too early to say that cognitive neuroscience will have any direct impact on how we sentence criminals, patterns are nevertheless emerging that suggest a neural framework for punishment that could one day have important legal and social consequences.

Medición y manipulación de normas sociales en juegos experimentales de corrupción

Los estudios experimentales de sobornos investigan los factores que modulan los comportamientos vinculados a estas situaciones de corrupción. Para que capten conductas análogas a la realidad, es necesario que representen de manera apropiada las normas sociales que se ven transgredidas cuando hay corrupción. En esta revisión presentamos críticamente tres técnicas para medir o generar normas sociales en experimentos económicos: el efecto de marco, la estimación de normas mediante un juego de coordinación y el castigo de terceros. Discutimos cómo la complementariedad y el mejoramiento de estas técnicas pueden contribuir a la validez externa de los estudios experimentales de corrupción.

Participation and punishment

Studies have demonstrated that altruistic punishment can motivate pro-social behavior in settings that require group cooperation. This paper extends these findings to the voter participation game. Using a laboratory experiment we find that some subjects are willing to punish abstainers and that punishment increases participation. However, not all subjects respond to punishment equally. We find that punishment increases turnout more among subjects with a egoist social value orientation (SVO) than among subjects with a pro-social SVO. This suggests that increased opportunities for altruistic punishment do not just increase participation, but may also change the composition of the electorate.

Third-Party Punishment as a Costly Signal of High Continuation Probabilities in Repeated Games

Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based account that invokes costly signaling (Jordan et al., 2016). This account proposed that type individuals (who are incentivized to cooperate with others) typically experience lower costs of TPP, and thus that TPP can function as a costly signal of trustworthiness. Specifically, it was argued that some but not all individuals face incentives to cooperate, making them high-quality and trustworthy interaction partners; and, because the same mechanisms that incentivize cooperation also create benefits for using TPP to deter selfish behavior, these individuals are likely to experience reduced costs of punishing selfishness. Here, we extend this conceptual framework by providing a concrete, from-the-ground-up model demonstrating how this process could work in the context of repeated interactions incentivizing both cooperation and punishment. We show how individual differences in the probability of future interaction can create types that vary in whether they find cooperation payoff-maximizing (and thus make high-quality partners), as well as in their net costs of TPP -- because a higher probability of future interaction increases the likelihood of receiving rewards the victim of the punished transgression (thus offsetting the cost of punishing). We also provide a simple model of dispersal that demonstrates how types that vary in their probability of future interaction can stably coexist, because the payoff remaining in one's local environment (i.e. not dispersing) decreases with the number of others who stay. Together, this model demonstrates, from the group up, how TPP can serve as a costly signal of trustworthiness arising exposure to repeated interactions.

Evolutionary Roots of Property Rights; The Natural and Cultural Nature of Human Cooperation

Debates about the role of natural and cultural selection in the development of prosocial, antisocial and socially neutral mechanisms and behavior raise questions that touch property rights, cooperation, and conflict. For example, some researchers suggest that cooperation and prosociality evolved by natural selection (Hamilton 1964, Trivers 1971, Axelrod and Hamilton 1981, De Waal 2013, 2014), while others claim that natural selection is insufficient for the evolution of cooperation, which required in addition cultural selection (Sterelny 2013, Bowles and Gintis 2003, Seabright 2013, Norenzayan 2013). Some scholars focus on the complexity and hierarchical nature of the evolution of cooperation as involving different tools associated with lower and the higher levels of competition (Nowak 2006, Okasha 2006); others suggest that humans genetically inherited heuristics that favor prosocial behavior such as generosity, forgiveness or altruistic punishment (Ridley 1996, Bowles and Gintis 2004, Rolls 2005). We argue these mechanisms are not genetically inherited; rather, they are features inherited through cultural selection. To support this view we invoke inclusive fitness theory, which states that individuals tend to maximize their inclusive fitness, rather than maximizing group fitness. We further reject the older notion of natural group selection - as well as more recent versions (West, Mouden, Gardner 2011) – which hold that natural selection favors cooperators within a group (Wynne-Edwards 1962). For Wynne-Edwards, group selection leads to group adaptations; the survival of individuals therefore depends on the survival of the group and a sharing of resources. Individuals who do not cooperate, who are selfish, face extinction due to rapid and over-exploitation of resources.

Turning a blind eye, but not the other cheek: On the robustness of costly punishment

The willingness to punish norm violation is an important component of many legal and social institutions, and much prior research demonstrates an apparent willingness to incur costs to punish individuals who act unfairly. But, will people rely on “excuses” to get out of having to act on costly punishment intentions, as they do with other costly pro-social acts? And how may the answer to this question depend on whether the punisher is the victim of a norm violation or an independent third party? We conduct an experiment and find that third parties punish reluctantly: although they indicate a preference to punish, they choose to avoid the opportunity to punish when they can do so without explicitly revealing that this is their preference. In contrast, second parties, who have been directly wronged, are resolute punishers—they actively seek out the opportunity to punish, even misrepresenting random outcomes in order to ensure that punishment is implemented. Our findings highlight important differences in the motives underlying second- and third-party punishment.

To what reference point do people calibrate cost-free, third-party punishment?

To what reference point(s) do third parties calibrate punishments to be inflicted upon unknown wrongdoers? We introduce a novel method that allows direct comparison of preferred punishments (and compensations) to victim loss and perpetrator gain. In two experiments, minimalist scenarios indicated various monetary gains for a thief and costs for a victim. Participants indicated a fine for the thief (the victim was uncompensated). We found that victim loss and perpetrator gain had about equal influence on punishment preferences. However, analysis of individual differences indicated a substantial number of participants (about 25% to 40%) preferred relatively large punishments (i.e., greater than the outcome differential—the sum of perpetrator gain and victim loss), and in both experiments the mean of preferred punishments was greater than the outcome differential. A third experiment used identical scenarios but instead had participants indicate a compensation for the victim. In contrast to punishment preferences, only about 2% of participants preferred victim compensation greater than the outcome differential and the mean compensation was less than the outcome differential.

Costly third-party interventions: The role of incidental anger and attention focus in punishment of the perpetrator and compensation of the victim

Costly third-party interventions have been regarded as hallmarks of moral behavior, because they are unlikely to be motivated by self-interest. This research investigated the cognitive and emotional processes underlying two types of costly third-party interventions by manipulating incidental emotions and attention focus. In Study 1, we investigated the effect of incidental anger on third-party punishment decisions. Study 2 addressed the effect of incidental anger on third-party compensation decisions. In both studies, participants were induced to either an angry or neutral emotion and then had to wait or were distracted before engaging in third-party interventions. In Study 1, angry participants punished highly unequal distributions significantly more than those in the neutral emotion condition. In Study 2, angry participants compensated highly unfair distributions significantly less than those in a neutral emotion. In both studies, the effect of incidental anger was only significant in the wait, not the distraction condition. Study 3 again focused on third-party compensation decisions. Participants were induced to either a self-focused anger or an other-focused anger emotion, and attention focus (wait, distraction) was manipulated experimentally. Those in the other-focused anger condition compensated significantly more than participants in the self-focused anger condition. These results indicate that (self-focused) incidental anger led to antagonistic responses. Incidental anger was only associated with higher third-party compensation when it included a focus on a suffering other. For incidental emotions to bias subsequent decisions requires attentional resources.

Second-party and third-party punishment in a public goods experiment

ABSTRACTWe experimentally investigate whether third-party punishment is more effective than second-party punishment to increase public goods contribution. In our experiment, third parties first played the standard public goods game and then made punishment decisions as independent bystanders. We find that third parties punished more frequently, severely and less antisocially, resulting in a higher contribution level than that driven by second-party punishment. The third party’s exaggerated emotion towards free riders is proposed to explain their superior punishment effectiveness.