Marlowe Frank W, Berbesque J Colette
Department of Anthropology, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA.
Proc Biol Sci. 2008 Mar 7;275(1634):587-90. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1517.
If individuals will cooperate with cooperators, and punish non-cooperators even at a cost to themselves, then this strong reciprocity could minimize the cheating that undermines cooperation. Based upon numerous economic experiments, some have proposed that human cooperation is explained by strong reciprocity and norm enforcement. Second-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on you; third-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on someone else. Third-party punishment is an effective way to enforce the norms of strong reciprocity and promote cooperation. Here we present new results that expand on a previous report from a large cross-cultural project. This project has already shown that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in punishment and cooperation. Here we test the hypothesis that population size (and complexity) predicts the level of third-party punishment. Our results show that people in larger, more complex societies engage in significantly more third-party punishment than people in small-scale societies.
如果个体愿意与合作者合作，甚至不惜以自身利益为代价惩罚不合作者，那么这种强烈的互惠行为可以将破坏合作的欺骗行为降至最低。基于大量经济实验，一些人提出人类合作可以通过强烈的互惠行为和规范执行来解释。第二方惩罚是指你惩罚背叛你的人；第三方惩罚是指你惩罚背叛他人的人。第三方惩罚是执行强烈互惠规范和促进合作的有效方式。在此，我们展示了新的研究结果，这些结果扩展了之前一个大型跨文化项目的报告。该项目已经表明，在惩罚和合作方面存在相当大的跨文化差异。在此，我们检验人口规模（和复杂性）预测第三方惩罚水平的假设。我们的结果表明，与小规模社会中的人相比，规模更大、更复杂社会中的人进行的第三方惩罚要多得多。
