Journal ArticleDOI
Altruistic punishment in humans.
Ernst Fehr,Simon Gächter +1 more
TLDR
In this article, it was shown that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment and that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishments are possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out.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 cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation flourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out. The evidence indicates that negative emotions towards defectors are the proximate mechanism behind altruistic punishment. These results suggest that future study of the evolution of human cooperation should include a strong focus on explaining altruistic punishment.read more
Citations
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The WEIRDest People in the World
TL;DR: A review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers.
Journal ArticleDOI
Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: Five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation are discussed: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocities, network reciprocation, group selection, and group selection.
Journal ArticleDOI
WEIRD languages have misled us, too [Comment on Henrich et al.]
Asifa Majid,Stephen C. Levinson +1 more
Journal ArticleDOI
Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition
TL;DR: It is argued and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention (shared intentionality), and children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life.
Journal ArticleDOI
The nature of human altruism
Ernst Fehr,Urs Fischbacher +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors point out that current gene-based evolutionary theories cannot explain important patterns of human altruism, pointing towards the importance of both theories of cultural evolution as well as gene-culture co-evolution.
References
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Book
The Evolution of Cooperation
TL;DR: In this paper, a model based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game was developed for cooperation in organisms, and the results of a computer tournament showed how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Genetical Evolution of Social Behaviour. I
TL;DR: A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another's fitness and a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness, named “inclusive fitness”.
Journal ArticleDOI
z-Tree: Zurich toolbox for ready-made economic experiments
TL;DR: Z-Tree as mentioned in this paper is a toolbox for ready-made economic experiments, which allows programming almost any kind of experiments in a short time and is stable and easy to use.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism
TL;DR: In this paper, a model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior, and the model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system.
Journal ArticleDOI
Evolution of indirect reciprocity by image scoring
TL;DR: It is proposed that the emergence of indirect reciprocity was a decisive step for the evolution of human societies and the probability of knowing the ‘image’ of the recipient must exceed the cost-to-benefit ratio of the altruistic act.