The DOI matches its Crossref record; 40 of the 40 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
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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“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]
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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 [30]
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Cites
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Cited by
Sorted by citations
Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation
Nowak, M. A. (2006) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1133755 · Cited by 5,894
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2003) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature02043 · Cited by 3,475
Third-party punishment and social norms
Fehr, E., & Fischbacher, U. (2004) · Evolution and Human Behavior · doi:10.1016/s1090-5138(04)00005-4 · Cited by 2,417
“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., et al. (2005) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x05000142 · Cited by 1,898
Self-citationSocial semantics: altruism, cooperation, mutualism, strong reciprocity and group selection.
WEST, S. A., GRIFFIN, A. S., & GARDNER, A. (2007) · Journal of Evolutionary Biology · doi:10.1111/j.1420-9101.2006.01258.x · Cited by 1,889
Metadata
- 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 › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › 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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