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Altruistic punishment and the origin of cooperation
Open accessAbstract
How did human cooperation evolve? Recent evidence shows that many people are willing to engage in altruistic punishment, voluntarily paying a cost to punish noncooperators. Although this behavior helps to explain how cooperation can persist, it creates an important puzzle. If altruistic punishment provides benefits to nonpunishers and is costly to punishers, then how could it evolve? Drawing on recent insights from voluntary public goods games, I present a simple evolutionary model in which altruistic punishers can enter and will always come to dominate a population of contributors, defectors, and nonparticipants. The model suggests that the cycle of strategies in voluntary public goods games does not persist in the presence of punishment strategies. It also suggests that punishment can only enforce payoff-improving strategies, contrary to a widely cited “folk theorem” result that suggests that punishment can allow the evolution of any strategy.
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“Free riding poses a major challenge to self-governance, and a prominent solution to this challenge has been altruistic punishment.”
From Cooperation without punishment (2023) · cites this paper as [33]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Fowler, J. H.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Davis (US)
- Corresponding author
- Fowler, James H.
- ORCID
- Fowler, James H.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2005-04-27
- Volume
- 102
- Issue
- 19
- Pages
- 7047-7049
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC1100778
- OpenAlex
- W2150737844
- Cited by
- 473
- References
- 20
- Citations by year
- 2026: 14 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 16 · 2023: 22 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 30 · 2020: 17 · 2019: 26 · 2018: 31 · 2017: 40 · 2016: 13 · 2015: 24 · 2014: 35 · 2013: 34 · 2012: 27
- FWCI
- 51.03
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- europepmc.org
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Keywords
- altruistic punishment, evolution of cooperation, evolutionary game theory, folk theorem, punishment strategies, defectors, non-participants
- MeSH terms
- Altruism, Behavior, Cooperative Behavior, Biological Evolution, Game Theory, Humans, Interpersonal Relations, Models, Theoretical, Population Dynamics, Punishment, Social Behavior
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