Garfield Zachary H, Ringen Erik J, Buckner William, Medupe Dithapelo, Wrangham Richard W, Glowacki Luke
Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Université de Toulouse 1 Capitole, Toulouse, France.
Department of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA.
Evol Hum Sci. 2023 Apr 13;5:e11. doi: 10.1017/ehs.2023.7. eCollection 2023.
Punishments for norm violations are hypothesised to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but are rarely studied from a comparative perspective. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely non-industrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape or war cowardice and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modelling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting that punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. Taken together, our results suggest that the role and kind of punishment vary both by the severity of the norm violation, but also by the specific socio-economic system of the society.
违反规范的惩罚被认为是人类维持合作的关键组成部分，但很少从比较的角度进行研究。我们调查了惩罚制度与社会生态学和文化历史的相关程度。我们从标准跨文化样本数据库中获取数据，并对来自131个主要非工业社会样本的民族志文献进行编码。我们记录了对违反规范行为的惩罚是否涉及通奸、宗教、食物、强奸或战争懦弱，以及制裁是声誉性的、身体上的、物质性的还是处决性的。我们使用贝叶斯系统发育回归模型来测试文化层面的协变。我们发现惩罚类型的证据中几乎没有系统发育信号的迹象，这表明惩罚制度在文化进化历史中变化相对较快。我们发现有证据表明，声誉惩罚与平等主义和缺乏食物储存有关；物质惩罚与有食物储存有关；身体惩罚与对狩猎的更大依赖适度相关；处决惩罚与社会分层适度相关。综合来看，我们的结果表明，惩罚的作用和类型不仅因违反规范的严重程度而异，还因社会的具体社会经济制度而异。
