Abbink Klaus, Gangadharan Lata, Handfield Toby, Thrasher John
Department of Economics, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia.
SOPHIS, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, 3800, Australia.
Nat Commun. 2017 Sep 20;8(1):609. doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-00731-0.
Social norms are an important element in explaining how humans achieve very high levels of cooperative activity. It is widely observed that, when norms can be enforced by peer punishment, groups are able to resolve social dilemmas in prosocial, cooperative ways. Here we show that punishment can also encourage participation in destructive behaviours that are harmful to group welfare, and that this phenomenon is mediated by a social norm. In a variation of a public goods game, in which the return to investment is negative for both group and individual, we find that the opportunity to punish led to higher levels of contribution, thereby harming collective payoffs. A second experiment confirmed that, independently of whether punishment is available, a majority of subjects regard the efficient behaviour of non-contribution as socially inappropriate. The results show that simply providing a punishment opportunity does not guarantee that punishment will be used for socially beneficial ends, because the social norms that influence punishment behaviour may themselves be destructive.Punishment by peers can enforce social norms, such as contributing to a public good. Here, Abbink and colleagues show that individuals will enforce norms even when contributions reduce the net benefit of the group, resulting in the maintenance of wasteful contributions.
社会规范是解释人类如何实现高度合作活动的一个重要因素。人们广泛观察到，当规范能够通过同伴惩罚来执行时，群体就能以亲社会、合作的方式解决社会困境。在此我们表明，惩罚也会鼓励参与对群体福利有害的破坏性行为，而且这一现象是由一种社会规范介导的。在一种公共物品博弈的变体中，即对群体和个体而言投资回报均为负的情况下，我们发现惩罚机会导致了更高水平的贡献，从而损害了集体收益。第二项实验证实，无论是否有惩罚机会，大多数受试者都认为不贡献这种有效行为在社会上是不合适的。结果表明，仅仅提供一个惩罚机会并不能保证惩罚会被用于社会有益的目的，因为影响惩罚行为的社会规范本身可能具有破坏性。同伴惩罚可以执行社会规范，比如为公共物品做出贡献。在此，阿宾克及其同事表明，即使贡献会减少群体的净收益，个体也会执行规范，从而导致维持浪费性的贡献。
