Definition
Elicitors of the desire to punish a wrongdoer
Introduction
People are motivated to punish cheaters, but substantial disagreement exists among philosophers and social scientists regarding why. Evolutionary psychologists have been drawn to human punishment because sometimes it appears to be altruistic punishment¸ costly but non-beneficial to the punisher, making it an anomaly for evolutionary, functional explanations – that is, explanations of how the fitness consequences of a psychological phenomenon enable and shape its adaptive evolution. Functional explanations provide answers to the question of why humans punish – that is, they articulate aspects of human experience that make people want to punish wrongdoers. Evolutionary psychologists have proposed two main classes of functional explanations for human punishment. Adaptationistexplanations assume that selection is driven exclusively by the...
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References
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Koenig, B.L. (2017). Motivates Punishment. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1625-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1625-1
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