The evolution of altruistic punishment
Open accessAbstract
Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such “altruistic punishment” may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing models suggest that altruistic cooperation among nonrelatives is evolutionarily stable only in small groups. Thus, applying such models to the evolution of altruistic punishment leads to the prediction that people will not incur costs to punish others to provide benefits to large groups of nonrelatives. However, here we show that an important asymmetry between altruistic cooperation and altruistic punishment allows altruistic punishment to evolve in populations engaged in one-time, anonymous interactions. This process allows both altruistic punishment and altruistic cooperation to be maintained even when groups are large and other parameter values approximate conditions that characterize cultural evolution in the small-scale societies in which humans lived for most of our prehistory.
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Punishment-based mechanisms are sensitive to errors that involve either punishing cooperators or not punishing free-riders.
“Second, they are sensitive to errors that involve either punishing cooperators or not punishing free-riders23,30.”
From Cooperation without punishment (2023) · cites this paper as [30]
The Results report that a high probability of mistaken defection can make punishment too costly to evolve, and the model describes cooperators who occasionally defect and are then punished. The Results also show that insufficient punishment lets defectors persist, but our copy does not examine errors in which punishers fail to punish free-riders. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredAltruistic punishment is a prominent solution to the challenge of free riding.
“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 [30]
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- Authors
- Boyd, R., Gintis, H., Bowles, S., & Richerson, P. J.
- Affiliations
- Santa Fe Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Boyd, Robert
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2003-03-11
- Volume
- 100
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 3531-3535
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC152327
- OpenAlex
- W2155753204
- Cited by
- 1,748
- References
- 40
- Citations by year
- 2026: 46 · 2025: 68 · 2024: 70 · 2023: 70 · 2022: 58 · 2021: 87 · 2020: 92 · 2019: 89 · 2018: 71 · 2017: 98 · 2016: 67 · 2015: 86 · 2014: 93 · 2013: 80 · 2012: 84
- FWCI
- 193.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Keywords
- altruistic punishment, evolution of cooperation, one-shot interactions, anonymous interactions, large groups, evolutionarily stable strategy, cultural evolution, small-scale societies, human prehistory
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Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
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