Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans

Abstract

Social sanctioning is widely considered a successful strategy to promote cooperation among humans. In situations in which individual and collective interests are at odds, incentives to free-ride induce individuals to refrain from contributing to public goods provision. Experimental evidence from public goods games shows that when endowed with sanctioning powers, conditional cooperators can discipline defectors, thus leading to greater levels of cooperation. However, extant evidence is based on peer punishment institutions, whereas in complex societies, systems of control are often centralized: for instance, we do not sanction our neighbors for driving too fast, the police do. Here we show the effect of centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority on cooperation. We designed an adaptation of the public goods game in which sanctioning power is given to a single monitor, and we experimentally manipulated the process by which the monitor is chosen. To increase the external validity of the study, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 1,543 Ugandan farmers from 50 producer cooperatives. This research provides evidence of the effectiveness of centralized sanctioning and demonstrates the causal effect of legitimacy on cooperation: participants are more responsive to the authority of an elected monitor than a randomly chosen monitor. Our essay contributes to the literature on the evolution of cooperation by introducing the idea of role differentiation. In complex societies, cooperative behavior is not only sustained by mechanisms of selection and reciprocity among peers, but also by the legitimacy that certain actors derive from their position in the social hierarchy.

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

“…Experiments have repeatedly found that individuals placed in social dilemmas and allowed to communicate achieve better outcomes than if they are not allowed to communicate [28]. Those using communication both to agree on a joint investment strategy and to choose their own sanctioning system achieve results close to the group's optimum ( [28], see also [29]). Field studies have illustrated how institutional rules, designed by resource users themselves, allow for the self-organized management of irrigation [5,30,31], fishing and harvesting systems [13].…”

Human Prosocial Motivation and the Maintenance of Social Order

“…The presence of peer punishment might make cooperation worthwhile, but so can incentives provided by other mechanisms. For example, O'Gorman, Henrich, and Van Vugt (2009) and Baldassarri and Grossman (2011) studied centralized punishment by one group member and found it quite effective. Centralized punishment can even be effective if it is not deterrent (Engel 2013).…”

Regulating the Regulation

“…Laboratory experiments have shown that restriction of punishment rights increases the efficiency of use of punishment, both when rights are centralized to one punishing agent (Baldassarri & Grossman 2011;O'Gorman, Henrich & Van Vugt 2009) and when rights are decentralized so that every agent punishes one other agent (Eriksson, Strimling & Ehn, in press). These findings support the notion that low levels of punishment are optimal for the group, and that norms that restrict punishment could serve a general purpose of lowering levels of punishment to less destructive levels.…”