Definition
The costly act of produce a loss to a noncooperative behaver enhances the reputation of a group as cooperative one.
Introduction
During the evolutionary history of the human species, some survival increasing activities were group ones, consisting in a public good (Fehr and Gächter 2002). Hunting, warfare, and protection of common resources are some good examples. In public good situations, each member of the group benefits from the good, and its maintenance is a shared responsibility. Some members of the group will pay costs for the maintenance of the public good, the cooperators, while others will benefit from the good without paying any costs, the free riders. Increases in the number of the free riders will lead to a collapse and consequent extinction of the public good, harming the whole group (Hardin 1968). One measure to prevent such increases is to punish free riders, in order to curb such behavior....
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
References
Barclay, P. (2006). Reputational benefits for altruistic punishment. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, 325–344. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2006.01.003.
Boyd, R., Gintis, H., Bowles, S., & Richerson, P. J. (2003). The evolution of altruistic punishment. PNAS, 100(6), 3531–3535. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0630443100.
Brosnan, S. F., & Bshary, R. (2016). On potential links between inequity aversion and the structure of interactions for the evolution of cooperation. Behaviour, 153, 9–11. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568539X-00003355.
Brosnan, S. F., & de Waal, F. B. (2014). Evolution of responses to (un)fairness. Science (New York, N.Y.), 346(6207), 1251776. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1251776.
Chaudhuri, A. (2010). Sustaining cooperation in laboratory public goods experiments: A selective survey of the literature. Experimental Economics, 14(1), 47–83. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-010-9257-1.
Dawes, C. T., Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T., McElreath, R., & Smirnov, O. (2007). Egalitarian motives in humans. Nature, 446, 794–796. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature05651.
dos Santos, M., Rankin, D. J., & Wedekind, C. (2010). The evolution of punishment through reputation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278, 371–377. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2010.1275.
Egas, M., & Riedl, A. (2008). The economics of altruistic punishment and the maintenance of cooperation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 275(1637), 871–878. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2007.1558.
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004). Third-party punishment and social norms. Evolution and Human Behavior, 25(2), 63–87. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(04)00005-4.
Fehr, E., & Gächter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/415137a.
Fehr, E., & Rockenbach, B. (2003). Detrimental effects of sanctions on human altruism. Nature, 442, 137–140. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01474.
Fowler, J. H. (2005). Altruistic punishment and the evolution of cooperation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 102, 7047–7049. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0500938102.
Fowler, J. H., Johnson, T., & Smirnov, O. (2004). Egalitarian motive and altruistic punishment. Nature, 433, E1–E2. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature03256.
Gächter, S., Renner, E., & Sefton, M. (2008). The long-run benefits of punishment. Science, 322, 1510. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1164744.
Gürerk, O., Irlenbusch, B., & Rockenbach, B. (2006). The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions. Science, 312, 108–111. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1123633.
Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science, 162(3859), 1243–1248. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243.
Henrich, J. (2006). Cooperation, punishment, and the evolution of human institutions. Science, 312(5770), 60–61. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1126398.
Henrich, J., & Boyd, R. (2001). Why people punish defectors: Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208, 79–89. https://doi.org/10.1006/jtbi.2000.2202.
Henrich, J., et al. (2006). Costly punishment across human societies. Science, 312, 1767–1770. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1127333.
Hermann, B., Thöni, C., & Gächter, S. (2008). Antisocial punishment across societies. Science, 319, 1362–1367. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1153808.
Hughes, E., Leibo, J. Z., Phillips, M., Tuyls, K., Dueñez-Guzman, E., Castañeda, A. G., Dunning, I., Zhu, T., McKee, K., Koster, R., Roff, H., & Graepel, T. (2018). Inequity aversion improves cooperation in intertemporal social dilemmas. In Advances in neural information processing systems (NIPS). Montreal, Canada.
Johnson, T., Dawes, C. T., Fowler, J. H., McElreath, R., & Smirnov, O. (2009). The role of egalitarian motives in altruistic punishment. Economics Letters, 102, 192–194. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.Econlet.2009.01.003.
Nelissen, R. M. A. (2008). The price you pay: Cost-dependent reputation effects of altruistic punishment. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29(4), 242–248. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2008.01.001.
Rabin, M. (1993). Incorporating fairness into game theory and economics. American Economic Review, 80(5), 1281–1302.
Raihani, N. J., & McAuliffe, K. (2012). Human punishment is motivated by inequity aversion, not a desire for reciprocity. Biology Letters, 8(5), 802–804. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0470.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Section Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this entry
Cite this entry
Vasconcelos, I.G. (2020). Altruistic Punishment Enhances Reputation. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1634-1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1634-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6
eBook Packages: Springer Reference Behavioral Science and PsychologyReference Module Humanities and Social SciencesReference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences