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Punishment and the potency of group selection

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Abstract

It is known that altruism can be sustained in an evolving population by a process of group selection. There is also existing research on the role that punishment can play in inducing selfish agents to behave more co-operatively or in preventing selfish agents from evolving, and the limitations upon this mechanism. This paper embeds a simple model of a punishment system within an indirect cultural evolution framework. The use of punishment is shown to reduce the potency of the group selection mechanism, and thus the level of evolved altruism. This presents a novel reason why the use of punishment may have negative dynamic welfare implications.

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Notes

  1. Antisocial punishment involves sanctions such as altruistic punishment being directed against co-operators instead of non-co-operators. (On one explanatory hypothesis, it may be carried out by non-co-operators retaliating against observed previous punishment which they believe to have been carried out by co-operators.) The prevalence of this phenomenon is socially dependent and negatively correlated to the depth of the rule of law and civic society.

  2. In this study, entire groups play a public goods game where each individual starts with an amount of money to split between an individual and a group account. The group account is then doubled and split between the group members. Each individual then observes the contributions to the group account made by others, and can impose a punishment which harms both the punisher and the punishee, at a cost ratio of 1:3. Finally, group competition is introduced via a mechanism whereby a bonus or penalty is applied to each group based upon the relative size of the group account after contributions have been made.

  3. This is assuming, for simplicity, no discounting. Permitting discounting would be problematic because we would then have to decide whether or not to discount felicity payoffs as well as social utility payoffs. It would also not really add anything insightful to the analysis of a finite-move sequential game.

  4. A high altruism individual refraining from punishing and imposing the cost of 1 on the other individual at benefit \(\hat {\pi }\) to herself is equivalent to bestowing a benefit of 1 upon the other at a cost of \(\hat {\pi }\) to herself. The simultaneous-move punishment game therefore has almost the same payoffs as the prisoners’ dilemma, except that person 2, if she has phenotype L, punishes person 3 instead of person 1.

  5. \({U_{i}^{H}}\) and \({U_{i}^{L}}\) are the expected felicity payoffs in group i. Note also the introduction of a fixed payoff f. This is the same for both phenotypes and thus has no effect on relative fitness, but is needed to ensure that both types always gain a strictly positive payoff.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council and to the Royal Economic Society for funding this research. I would also like to thank Kevin Roberts, Chris Wallace, Peter Hammond and the referee for their useful comments, suggestions and feedback on various drafts of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

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  1. Brasenose College and Hertford College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK

    Richard Povey

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  1. Richard Povey
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Correspondence to Richard Povey.

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Povey, R. Punishment and the potency of group selection. J Evol Econ 24, 799–816 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-014-0375-3

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