Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e44432. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044432. Epub 2012 Sep 12.
Punishment offers a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies, but the maintenance of costly punishment itself remains problematic. Game theory has shown that corruption, where punishers can defect without being punished themselves, may sustain cooperation. However, in many human societies and some insect ones, high levels of cooperation coexist with low levels of corruption, and such societies show greater wellbeing than societies with high corruption. Here we show that small payments from cooperators to punishers can destabilize corrupt societies and lead to the spread of punishment without corruption (righteousness). Righteousness can prevail even in the face of persistent power inequalities. The resultant righteous societies are highly stable and have higher wellbeing than corrupt ones. This result may help to explain the persistence of costly punishing behavior, and indicates that corruption is a sub-optimal tool for maintaining cooperation in human societies.
惩罚为人类和动物社会的合作提供了一种强大的机制，但代价高昂的惩罚本身的维持仍然是个问题。博弈论表明，在腐败中，惩罚者可以不被惩罚而背叛，这可能会维持合作。然而，在许多人类社会和一些昆虫社会中，高水平的合作与低水平的腐败并存，这些社会比腐败程度高的社会表现出更好的幸福感。在这里，我们表明，合作者向惩罚者支付少量报酬可以破坏腐败社会，并导致没有腐败（正义）的惩罚传播。正义即使在持续的权力不平等面前也能占上风。由此产生的正义社会比腐败社会更加稳定，幸福感也更高。这一结果可能有助于解释昂贵的惩罚行为的持续存在，并表明腐败是维持人类社会合作的一种次优工具。
