Strong reciprocity theorists claim that punishment has evolved to promote the good of the group and to deter cheating. By contrast, weak reciprocity suggests that punishment aims to restore justice (i.e., reciprocity) between the criminal and his victim. Experimental evidences as well as field observations suggest that humans punish criminals to restore fairness rather than to support group coo...

Book review: Zubkov K. (2023). Enlighten and Punish: The Functions of Censorship in the Russian Empire Middle 19th Century. Moscow: New Literary Review. — 520 s. (Series: “Scientific Application”, vol. CCL). ISBN 978-5-4448-1956-2. (In Russian).

Compassion, the emotional response of caring for another who is suffering and that results in motivation to relieve suffering, is thought to be an emotional antecedent to altruistic behavior. However, it remains unclear whether compassion enhances altruistic behavior in a uniform way or is specific to sub-types of behavior such as altruistic helping of a victim or altruistic punishment of a tra...

Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevert...

Institutional punishment plays a central role in human societies. Yet research in evolutionary game theory has focused almost exclusively on peer punishment. Here we present a model for the evolution of institutional punishment. We consider a set of states (“kingdoms”), each consisting of a number of individuals (“subjects”) and a single leader (“king”). Subjects choose how much to pay to the k...

a r t i c l e i n f o Humans willingly pay a cost to punish defecting partners in experimental games. However, the psychological motives underpinning punishment are unclear. Punishment could stem from the desire to reciprocally harm a cheat (i.e. revenge) which is arguably indicative of a deterrent function. Alternatively, punishment could be motivated by the desire to redress the balance betwe...