Department of Economics, University of Milan, 20122 Milan, Italy.
Behav Brain Sci. 2012 Feb;35(1):45-59. doi: 10.1017/s0140525x1100166x.
I argue in my target article that field evidence does not support the costly punishment hypothesis. Some commentators object to my reading of the evidence, while others agree that evidence in favour of costly punishment is scant. Most importantly, no rigorous measurement of cost-benefit ratios in the field has been attempted so far. This lack of evidence does not rule out costly punishment as a cause of human cooperation, but it does pre-empt some overconfident claims made in the past. Other commentators have interpreted my article as an anti-experimental pamphlet or as a flat denial of the existence of pro-social motives--which it was not intended to be. While we have enough data to establish the existence (and theoretical relevance) of strong reciprocity motives, I argue in this response that their efficacy (and policy relevance) has not been demonstrated.
我在目标文章中主张，实地证据并不支持代价高昂的惩罚假说。一些评论者反对我对证据的解读，而另一些评论者则同意支持代价高昂的惩罚的证据很少。最重要的是，迄今为止，还没有人尝试对实地的成本效益比进行严格的衡量。这种缺乏证据并不能排除代价高昂的惩罚是人类合作的原因，但它确实预先阻止了过去一些过于自信的主张。其他评论者将我的文章解读为反实验小册子，或断然否认亲社会动机的存在——这并不是我的本意。虽然我们有足够的数据来确定强烈互惠动机的存在（和理论相关性），但我在这篇回应文章中主张，它们的功效（和政策相关性）尚未得到证明。
