Punishing Defectors
Humans are much better at cooperation than simple evolutionary models explain. Some, like Christopher Boehm, have suggested that cooperative punishment of defectors - rule breakers, liars, psychopaths, those who don't play together well, etc - is the key explanatory principle. Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter, writing in Nature, claim to have experimental results demonstrating this. Their abstract: Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and the selfish motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperat...