Punish and Voice: Punishment Enhances Cooperation when Combined with Norm-Signalling

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 between instrumental decision-making and the norm psychology humans are provided with. Norm psychology is a cognitive machinery to detect and reason upon norms that is characterized by a salience mechanism devoted to track how much a norm is prominent within a group. We test our hypothesis both in the laboratory and with an agent-based model. The agent-based model incorporates fundamental aspects of norm psychology absent from previous work. The combination of these methods allows us to provide an explanation for the proximate mechanisms behind the observed cooperative behaviour. The consistency between the two sources of data supports our hypothesis that cooperation is a product of norm psychology solicited by norm-signalling and coercive devices.

Publication type: 
Articolo
Author or Creator: 
Andrighetto, Giulia
Brandts, Jordi
Conte, Rosaria
Sabater-Mir, Jordi
Solaz, Hector
Villatoro, Daniel
Publisher: 
Public Library of Science, San Francisco, CA , Stati Uniti d'America
Source: 
PloS one 8 (2013). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064941
info:cnr-pdr/source/autori:Andrighetto, Giulia; Brandts, Jordi; Conte, Rosaria; Sabater-Mir, Jordi; Solaz, Hector; Villatoro, Daniel/titolo:Punish and Voice: Punishment Enhances Cooperation when Combined with Norm-Signalling/doi:10.1371/journal.pone.00649
Date: 
2013
Resource Identifier: 
http://www.cnr.it/prodotto/i/309279
https://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0064941
info:doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0064941
Language: 
Eng
ISTC Author: 
rosaria.conte's picture
Real name: 
Giulia Andrighetto's picture
Real name: