Punish and voice: punishment enhances cooperation when combined with norm-signalling.

ABSTRACT: Material punishment has been suggested to play a key role in sustaining human cooperation. Experimental findings, however, show that inflicting mere material costs does not always increase cooperation and may even have detrimental effects. Indeed, ethnographic evidence suggests that the most typical punishing strategies in human ecologies (e.g., gossip, derision, blame and criticism) naturally combine normative information with material punishment. Using laboratory experiments with humans, we show that the interaction of norm communication and material punishment leads to higher and more stable cooperation at a lower cost for the group than when used separately. In this work, we argue and provide experimental evidence that successful human cooperation is the outcome of the interaction betw

SUBMITTER: Andrighetto G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3680389 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature