Co-ordinated punishment and the evolution of co-operation

From the related public release:

Previous models of cooperation assumed that punishment of free-riders was uncoordinated and unconditional. One problem with these models was that the costs associated with punishment were often higher than the gains of cooperation. Thus, the cost of one group member's punishing a free-rider would be substantial and would not overweigh the gains achieved through increased cooperation.

Costs may be defined as loss of friendship or loss of relational closeness with other members of the group.

To address the problem, Boyd and his colleagues changed the assumptions built into previous cooperation/punishment models. First, they allowed for punishment to be coordinated among group members. In their model, group members could signal their willingness to punish someone who was not participating in the group, but punishment would only occur if it was coordinated. This meant the cost of punishing a free-rider would be distributed across members and would not be higher than the cost of gains achieved through increased cooperation.

Second, the researchers allowed for the cost of punishing a free-rider to decline as the number of punishers increased. Boyd explained that this new model was "catching up with common sense" because these two assumptions exist in reality.

Their model had three stages in which a large group of unrelated individuals interacted repeatedly. The first stage was a signaling stage where group members could signal their intent to punish. In the second stage, group members could choose to cooperate or not. The final stage was a punishment stage when group members could punish other group members.

The results of their model look a lot like what is seen in most human societies, where individuals meet and decide whether and how to punish group members who are not cooperating. This is coordinated punishment where group members signal their intent to punish, only punish when a threshold has been met and share the costs of punishing.

Boyd argues that even in societies without formal institutions for establishing rules and methods of punishment, group punishment appears to be effective at maintaining cooperation.

Here is an example of what the authors are talking about. Imagine you are living in the Old West and a gang has just robbed your neighbor's store. Clearly, if you went out to punish the perpetrators you would pay a high cost (they would be likely to kill you) and it wouldn't be successful. So, it doesn't make sense to punish individually. But, the sheriff could assemble a posse to go after the criminals. This would immediately reduce your risk (since you would be one target among many) and it would also increase your chance of success (as more punishers are more likely to achieve their goal).

Related posts:

• The evolution of altruistic punishment
• Moralistic punishment in front of an audience
• Strong Reciprocity and the Emergence of Large-Scale Societies
• Altruistic punishment in Papua New Guinea

Science, Vol. 328. no. 5978, pp. 617 - 620

Coordinated Punishment of Defectors Sustains Cooperation and Can Proliferate When Rare

Robert Boyd et al.

Abstract

Because mutually beneficial cooperation may unravel unless most members of a group contribute, people often gang up on free-riders, punishing them when this is cost-effective in sustaining cooperation. In contrast, current models of the evolution of cooperation assume that punishment is uncoordinated and unconditional. These models have difficulty explaining the evolutionary emergence of punishment because rare unconditional punishers bear substantial costs and hence are eliminated. Moreover, in human behavioral experiments in which punishment is uncoordinated, the sum of costs to punishers and their targets often exceeds the benefits of the increased cooperation that results from the punishment of free-riders. As a result, cooperation sustained by punishment may actually reduce the average payoffs of group members in comparison with groups in which punishment of free-riders is not an option. Here, we present a model of coordinated punishment that is calibrated for ancestral human conditions and captures a further aspect of reality missing from both models and experiments: The total cost of punishing a free-rider declines as the number of punishers increases. We show that punishment can proliferate when rare, and when it does, it enhances group-average payoffs.

Link

The punishment of treason in ancient Athens

"Archeptolemus son of Hippodamus, the Agrylian, and Antiphon son of Sophilus, the Rhamnusian, being both present in court, are condemned of treason. And this was to be their punishment: that they should be delivered to the eleven executioners, their goods confiscated, the tenth part of them being first consecrated to Athene; their houses to be levelled with the ground, and in the places where they stood this inscription to be engraved on brass, '[The houses] of Archeptolemus and Antiphon, traitors.'

That Archeptolemus and Antiphon should neither of them be buried in Athens, nor anywhere else under that government. And besides all this, that their posterity should be accounted infamous, bastards as well as their lawful descendants; and he too should be held infamous who should adopt any one of their descendants for his son. And that all this should be engraved on a brass tablet, and that tablet should be placed where that stands on which is engraved the decree concerning Phrynichus."

http://www.attalus.org/old/orators1.html

"Let there be one ruler, one king"

Related to the Homeric verse of the title.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B doi: 10.1098/rspb.2008.1082

Constraining free riding in public goods games: designated solitary punishers can sustain human cooperation

Rick O'Gorman et al.

Abstract

Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Unlike other animals, people frequently cooperate with non-relatives in large groups. Evolutionary models of large-scale cooperation require not just incentives for cooperation, but also a credible disincentive for free riding. Various theoretical solutions have been proposed and experimentally explored, including reputation monitoring and diffuse punishment. Here, we empirically examine an alternative theoretical proposal: responsibility for punishment can be borne by one specific individual. This experiment shows that allowing a single individual to punish increases cooperation to the same level as allowing each group member to punish and results in greater group profits. These results suggest a potential key function of leadership in human groups and provides further evidence supporting that humans will readily and knowingly behave altruistically.

Link

Political orientation and physiological response

I have often noticed when I turn on the TV and there is a political discussion going on with speakers I don't recognize, that it's often possible to guess (better than chance) the participants' side. Whether it's appearance, clothing, or mannerisms, there may be subtle clues that our minds have come to associate with particular political attitudes. For that to be possible, however, political orientation should be made manifest in some way. In this paper, it is shown that people who are startled more easily tend to be more right-wing in the American political spectrum. It would be interesting to repeat this experiment in other countries. (I'll post the abstract when I see it -- posted)

UPDATE (Sep 19): John Hawks posts a long and skeptical commentary on the study, which should be read by anyone interested in the subject.

Political attitudes are predicted by physiological traits

HOUSTON -- (Sept. 16, 2008) -- Is America's red-blue divide based on voters' physiology? A new paper in the journal Science, titled "Political Attitudes Are Predicted by Physiological Traits," explores the link.

Rice University's John Alford, associate professor of political science, co-authored the paper in the Sept. 19 issue of Science.

Alford and his colleagues studied a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs. Those individuals with "measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism and the Iraq War," the authors wrote.

Science Vol. 321. no. 5896, pp. 1667 - 1670
DOI: 10.1126/science.1157627

Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits

Douglas R. Oxley et al.

Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence that variations in political attitudes correlate with physiological traits. In a group of 46 adult participants with strong political beliefs, individuals with measurably lower physical sensitivities to sudden noises and threatening visual images were more likely to support foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism, and gun control, whereas individuals displaying measurably higher physiological reactions to those same stimuli were more likely to favor defense spending, capital punishment, patriotism, and the Iraq War. Thus, the degree to which individuals are physiologically responsive to threat appears to indicate the degree to which they advocate policies that protect the existing social structure from both external (outgroup) and internal (norm-violator) threats.

Link

Strong Reciprocity and the Emergence of Large-Scale Societies

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol. 38, No. 2, 192-210 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0048393108315509

Strong Reciprocity and the Emergence of Large-Scale Societies

Benoît Dubreuil

The paper defends the idea that strong reciprocity, although it accounts for the existence of deep cooperation among humans, has difficulty explaining why humans lived for most of their history in band-size groups and why the emergence of larger societies was accompanied by increased social differentiation and political centralization. The paper argues that the costs of incurring an altruistic punishment rise in large groups and that the emergence of large-scale societies depends on the creation of institutions that render control of these costs possible through a social division of sanction.

Link

Selfishness as second-order altruism

Science Daily explains it all quite well.

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0712173105

Selfishness as second-order altruism

Omar Tonsi Eldakar, and David Sloan Wilson

Abstract

Selfishness is seldom considered a group-beneficial strategy. In the typical evolutionary formulation, altruism benefits the group, selfishness undermines altruism, and the purpose of the model is to identify mechanisms, such as kinship or reciprocity, that enable altruism to evolve. Recent models have explored punishment as an important mechanism favoring the evolution of altruism, but punishment can be costly to the punisher, making it a form of second-order altruism. This model identifies a strategy called "selfish punisher" that involves behaving selfishly in first-order interactions and altruistically in second-order interactions by punishing other selfish individuals. Selfish punishers cause selfishness to be a self-limiting strategy, enabling altruists to coexist in a stable equilibrium. This polymorphism can be regarded as a division of labor, or mutualism, in which the benefits obtained by first-order selfishness help to "pay" for second-order altruism.

Link

Altruistic punishment in Papua New Guinea

See a previous entry on altruistic punishment.

Nature 442, 912-915(24 August 2006) | doi:10.1038/nature04981

Parochial altruism in humans

Helen Bernhard et al.

Social norms and the associated altruistic behaviours are decisive for the evolution of human cooperation1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and the maintenance of social order10, and they affect family life, politics11 and economic interactions12. However, as altruistic norm compliance and norm enforcement often emerge in the context of inter-group conflicts13,14, they are likely to be shaped by parochialism15—a preference for favouring the members of one's ethnic, racial or language group. We have conducted punishment experiments16, which allow 'impartial' observers to punish norm violators, with indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea. Here we show that these experiments confirm the prediction of parochialism. We found that punishers protect ingroup victims—who suffer from a norm violation—much more than they do outgroup victims, regardless of the norm violator's group affiliation. Norm violators also expect that punishers will be lenient if the latter belong to their social group. As a consequence, norm violations occur more often if the punisher and the norm violator belong to the same group. Our results are puzzling for evolutionary multi-level selection theories based on selective group extinction2,3,4,5 as well as for theories of individual selection17,18,19; they also indicate the need to explicitly examine the interactions between individuals stemming from different groups in evolutionary models.

Link

Moralistic punishment in front of an audience

Evolution and Human Behavior (Article in Press)

Audience effects on moralistic punishmentstar

Robert Kurzban et al.

Abstract

Punishment has been proposed as being central to two distinctively human phenomena: cooperation in groups and morality. Here we investigate moralistic punishment, a behavior designed to inflict costs on another individual in response to a perceived moral violation. There is currently no consensus on which evolutionary model best accounts for this phenomenon in humans. Models that turn on individuals' cultivating reputations as moralistic punishers clearly predict that psychological systems should be designed to increase punishment in response to information that one's decisions to punish will be known by others. We report two experiments in which we induce participants to commit moral violations and then present third parties with the opportunity to pay to punish wrongdoers. Varying conditions of anonymity, we find that the presence of an audience—even if only the experimenter—causes an increase in moralistic punishment.

Link

Gene-culture co-evolution of costly punishment

Science 23 June 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5781, pp. 1767 - 1770

Costly Punishment Across Human Societies

Joseph Henrich et al.

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

Link

Chimpanzees aren't altruistic

In Spite of Ourselves

In Jensen's study, chimpanzees from the Wolfgang Koehler Primate Research Centre in Leipzig were given a choice; by pulling on a rope they could either deliver food to another chimpanzee or they could deliver it to an empty room. In both cases, the chimpanzee pulling the rope did not receive any food itself. Contrary to initial expectations the chimpanzees behaved neither altruistic nor spiteful. According to the researchers, both characteristics therefore seem to be human-specific.

An altruistic chimpanzee would give food to its neighbour, despite the effort in pulling the food, and a spiteful chimpanzee would prevent its neighbour from having the food by delivering it to the empty room.

'I predicted chimps would be spiteful. I thought if they knew they couldn't have the food, they wouldn't let anyone else have it.' Jensen found that half the time, the chimpanzees did nothing. A quarter of the time they delivered food to their neighbour, then a quarter of the time to the empty room. This demonstrated neither altruism nor spite.

'They didn't seem to care about the other guy one way or the other. All that concerned them was getting the food and they were completely focused on that. Even when they knew they couldn't have the food, they didn't help the other chimp but they weren't spiteful either.'

In contrast, humans are obviously altruistic. We give blood, we donate money to charity, and we volunteer to help strangers. This kind of altruism has never been demonstrated in any other animal except for humans and some believe it is one of the characteristics that makes us human. But Jensen says spite is just as important. As a form of punishment, spite can encourage cooperative behaviour by penalising cheaters.

'Punishing others is usually costly to yourself, whether that's the taxpayer or the lawmakers but punishment is still a natural part of modern society. We punish theft, murder and countless other crimes to keep the fabric of society together. Perhaps human society is where it is today because spite exists and there is a mechanism to punish cheaters.'

If altruism and spite are unique to humans and are not present in chimpanzees, then it is likely that these characteristics have arisen in the last 6 million years since humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor. Humans' intense regard for each other, either positive or negative, may have made an important contribution to our ability to cooperate, our sense of fairness, and the morality that defines today's society.

The evolution of altruistic punishment

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0500938102

Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation

James H. Fowler

How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers, then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited "folk theorem" result that suggests that punishment can allow the evolution of any strategy.

Link

How to eradicate drug production

International Journal of Drug Policy
Volume 16, Issue 2 , March 2005, Pages 81-91

Where have all the flowers gone?: evaluation of the Taliban crackdown against opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan

Graham Farrell et al.

Abstract

This study presents what we believe to be the first formal evaluation of the Taliban crackdown against opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the main source of the world's illicit heroin supply for most of the 1990s. From late 2000 and the year that followed, the Taliban enforced a ban on poppy farming via threats, forced eradication, and public punishment of transgressors. The result was a 99% reduction in the area of opium poppy farming in Taliban-controlled areas. The evaluation uses multiple comparison areas: the non-Taliban area of Afghanistan, neighbouring countries, the non-contiguous comparison area of Myanmar (Burma), and, the rest of the world. Alternative possible causes of the reduction such as drought, migration or changes in global opium markets are reviewed and excluded. It is concluded that the reduction in Afghan poppy cultivation was due to the enforcement action by the Taliban. Globally, the net result of the intervention produced an estimated 35% reduction in poppy cultivation and a 65% reduction in the potential illicit heroin supply from harvests in 2001. Though Afghan poppy growing returned to previous levels after the fall of the Taliban government, this may have been the most effective drug control action of modern times.

Link