More 'altruistic' punishment in larger societies

Abstract

If individuals will cooperate with cooperators, and punish non-cooperators even at a cost to themselves, then this strong reciprocity could minimize the cheating that undermines cooperation. Based upon numerous economic experiments, some have proposed that human cooperation is explained by strong reciprocity and norm enforcement. Second-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on you; third-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on someone else. Third-party punishment is an effective way to enforce the norms of strong reciprocity and promote cooperation. Here we present new results that expand on a previous report from a large cross-cultural project. This project has already shown that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in punishment and cooperation. Here we test the hypothesis that population size (and complexity) predicts the level of third-party punishment. Our results show that people in larger, more complex societies engage in significantly more third-party punishment than people in small-scale societies.

Figure 1

Minimum acceptable (non-punished) offers by (a) local group population (ρ=0.727, p=0.007, n=12) and (b) ethnic group population (ρ=0.764, p=0.006, n=11). (b) Has only 11 societies because ethnic group could not be calculated (or reliably identified) for Sanquianga. We used the Hadza MAO reported in the previous Science article (Henrich et al. 2006), excluding several players who probably did not understand the TPPG, the MAO drops from 5.65 to 0 (Marlowe in press), making all the associations reported here even stronger.