People prefer coordinated punishment in cooperative interactions

Abstract

Human groups can often maintain high levels of cooperation despite the threat of exploitation by individuals who reap the benefits of cooperation without contributing to its costs [1][2][3][4] . Prominent theoretical models suggest that cooperation is particularly likely to thrive if people join forces to curb free riding and punish their non-contributing peers in a coordinated fashion 5 . However, it is unclear whether and, if so, how people actually condition their punishment of peers on punishment behaviour by others. Here we provide direct evidence that many people prefer coordinated punishment. With two large-scale decision-making experiments (total N = 4,320), we create minimal and controlled conditions to examine preferences for conditional punishment and cleanly identify how individuals' punishment decisions are impacted by punishment behaviour by others. We find that the most frequent preference is to punish a peer only if another (third) individual does so as well. Coordinated punishment is particularly common among participants who shy away from initiating punishment. With an additional experiment we further show that preferences for conditional punishment are unrelated to well-studied preferences for conditional cooperation. Our results highlight the importance of conditional preferences in both positive and negative reciprocity, and provide strong empirical support for theories that explain cooperation based on coordinated punishment.

Children's evaluations of third-party responses to unfairness: Children prefer helping over punishment

“…Furthermore, alternative forms of punishment such as gossip or ostracism have been discussed as well (see Guala, 2012 for ethnographic record andMolleman et al, 2019 for coordinated punishment). However, despite the disagreements over what exactly are the underlying motives, costly punishment has been identified as an important phenomenon in the study of human cooperation because it addresses the issue of how to respond to acts of free-riding (Balliet et al, 2011;Boyd, Gintis, Bowles, & Richerson, 2003;Gurerk, Irlenbusch, & Rockenbach, 2006).…”

The dynamics of injunctive social norms

“…People can also punish because of general conformity (if others punish, so should I) or adherence to the fairness norm (if others pay costs of punishment, so should I). These factors lead to conditional punishment based on expectation that others will punish as well (Kamei, 2018;Molleman et al, 2019). There is also 'false enforcement' (Centola et al, 2005) when people enforce unpopular norms to show that they have complied out of genuine conviction and not because of social pressure.…”

Monitoring and punishment networks in an experimental common pool resource dilemma

“…These results differ from those predicted by the bystander effect studies and Carpenter et al (2012), who find that punishment levels are amongst the lowest in the CN and that more prosocial punishment is used in DCN (to maintain or raise contributions), compared to CN and UCN. A possible reason is that people may prefer coordinated punishment and may thus be willing to punish someone only when another individual is willing to do so as well (Ramalingam et al, 2016;Molleman et al, 2019). Another related reason may be that individuals may act as 'rational bystanders' if they believe that helping is only effective when more than one help-giver pitches in (Greitemeyer and Mügge, 2013) or that their personal contribution will be superfluous (Krueger and Massey, 2009); this is not unlikely in more complex environments like the nonlinear CPR appropriation dilemma.…”