Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies

Fitouchi, Léo; Singh, Manvir

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2023.03.001

Cited by 22 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…As with reputation damage, people might abstain from peer punishment to avoid retaliation, regardless of whether retaliation is actually possible. By contrast, institutionalised punishment in small-scale societies often functions to compensate victims while limiting the potential for feuds and cycles of retaliation 56,57 . Future research should uncover whether people are more willing to punish in these conventionalised contexts (e.g., see 58 ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do people punish? Evidence for a range of strategic concerns

Claessens,

Atkinson,

Raihani

2024

Preprint

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Costly punishment is thought to be a key mechanism sustaining human cooperation. However, the motives for punitive behaviour remain unclear. Although often assumed to be motivated by a desire to convert cheats into cooperators, punishment is also consistent with other functions, such as levelling payoffs or improving one’s relative position. We used six economic games to tease apart different motives for punishment and to explore whether different punishment strategies were associated with personality variables, political ideology, and religiosity. We used representative samples from the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 2010) to estimate the frequency of different punishment strategies in the population. The most common strategy was to never punish: prosocial individuals and those scoring high in honesty humility were among the least punitive in our sample, while religious individuals and those scoring high for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation were more punitive. For people who did punish, strategy use was more consistent with egalitarian motives than behaviour-change motives. Nevertheless, different punishment strategies were also associated with personality, social preferences, political ideology, and religiosity. Self-reports of behaviour in the games suggested that people have some insight into their punishment strategy. These findings highlight the multipurpose nature of human punishment and show how the different motives underpinning punishment decisions are linked with core character traits.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do people punish? Evidence for a range of strategic concerns

Claessens,

Atkinson,

Raihani

2024

Preprint

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“…This is also true of individual payoffs: Punishment over the long-term increases payoff for individuals and for groups of individuals (Gachter et al, 2008). Metaanalytic evidence also suggests that the effects of punishment on cooperation are robust across designs (Balliet et al, 2011), and cross-cultural work suggest that this link emerges across different societies as well (Henrich et al, 2006;Fitouchi & Singh, 2023, Mathew & Boyd, 2011. This work has been so central that costly punishment, at one point, was even said to have overshadowed the original aim to understand and characterize cooperation (Colman, 2006).…”

Section: What Is Punishment For?mentioning

confidence: 98%

Cooperation, Domination: Twin Functions of Third-Party Punishment

Wylie,

Gantman

2024

Preprint

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Rules serve many important functions in society. One such function is to codify, and make public and enforceable, a society’s desired prescriptions and proscriptions. This codification means that rules come with predefined punishments administered by third parties. We argue that when we look at how third parties punish rule violations, we see that rules and their punishments often serve dual functions. They support and help to maintain cooperation as it is usually theorized, but they also facilitate the domination of marginalized others. We begin by reviewing literature on rules and third-party punishment, arguing that a great deal of punishment research has neglected to consider the unique power of codified rules. We also argue that by focusing on codified rules, it becomes clear that the enforcement of such rules through third-party punishments is often used to exert control and oppress out-group members. By challenging the understanding of rules as facilitators of social harmony, we highlight their role in satisfying personal punishment motives, and facilitating discrimination in a way that is uniquely justifiable to those who enforce them.

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“…ultimatum games [31][32][33]46,50], thirdparty punishment games [31][32][33]46,48] and public goods games with punishment opportunities [16,42,57]) to examine consequential punishment decisions. Other cross-societal studies have relied on ethnographic descriptions of punishment, either collected from primary sources via interviews and observer reports [41], or more commonly based on secondary analyses of ethnographic databases [36,37,44,45,53]. A third large category of studies has used a vignette methodology, presenting participants with scenarios of norm violations and then measuring their self-reported tendencies or (hypothetical) decisions to punish violators [39,[54][55][56], or their judgements of the appropriateness of punishment [34,38,40].…”

Section: Literature Review Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Together, these findings show that some aspects of punishment are present in a large set of diverse societies. At the same time, detailed case studies suggest that there are several societies in which third-party punishment and norm enforcement are rare, if not absent [20,29,41] (see also [17,18]).…”

Section: Cross-societal Universals In Norm Enforcementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-societal variation in norm enforcement systems

Molho,

De Petrillo,

Garfield

et al. 2024

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

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Across human societies, people are sometimes willing to punish norm violators. Such punishment can take the form of revenge from victims, seemingly altruistic intervention from third parties, or legitimized sanctioning from institutional representatives. Although prior work has documented cross-cultural regularities in norm enforcement, substantial variation exists in the prevalence and forms of punishment across societies. Such cross-societal variation may arise from universal psychological mechanisms responding to different socio-ecological conditions, or from cultural evolutionary processes, resulting in different norm enforcement systems. To date, empirical evidence from comparative studies across diverse societies has remained disconnected, owing to a lack of interdisciplinary integration and a prevalent tendency of empirical studies to focus on different underpinnings of variation in norm enforcement. To provide a more complete view of the shared and unique aspects of punishment across societies, we review prior research in anthropology, economics and psychology, and take a first step towards integrating the plethora of socio-ecological and cultural factors proposed to explain cross-societal variation in norm enforcement. We conclude by discussing how future cross-societal research can use diverse methodologies to illuminate key questions on the domain-specificity of punishment, the diversity of tactics supporting social norms, and their role in processes of norm change. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’.

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Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies

Cited by 22 publications

References 72 publications

Why do people punish? Evidence for a range of strategic concerns

Why do people punish? Evidence for a range of strategic concerns

Cooperation, Domination: Twin Functions of Third-Party Punishment

Cross-societal variation in norm enforcement systems

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