Decoupling cooperation and punishment in humans shows that punishment is not an altruistic trait

Economic experiments have suggested that cooperative humans will altruistically match local levels of cooperation (conditional cooperation) and pay to punish non-cooperators (altruistic punishment). Evolutionary models have suggested that if altruists punish non-altruists this could favour the evolution of costly helping behaviours (cooperation) among strangers. An often-key requirement is that helping behaviours and punishing behaviours form one single conjoined trait (strong reciprocity). Previous economics experiments have provided support for the hypothesis that punishment and cooperation form one conjoined, altruistically motivated, trait. However, such a conjoined trait may be evolutionarily unstable, and previous experiments have confounded a fear of being punished with being surrounded by cooperators, two factors that could favour cooperation. Here, we experimentally decouple the fear of punishment from a cooperative environment and allow cooperation and punishment behaviour to freely separate (420 participants). We show, that if a minority of individuals is made immune to punishment, they (i) learn to stop cooperating on average despite being surrounded by high levels of cooperation, contradicting the idea of conditional cooperation and (ii) often continue to punish, ‘hypocritically’, showing that cooperation and punishment do not form one, altruistically motivated, linked trait.

The Rise of a Normative Species

Part I of the volume takes up an unsettling thesis advanced by F. A. Hayek: that our evolved, tribal, and egalitarian sentiments are in deep conflict with the impartiality and inclusiveness of the Open Society. Hayek, it argues, was correct that the core of human morality arose during the long hunter-gatherer period in our history. However, Hayek largely overlooked the extent to which human cooperation arose on the basis of strong reciprocity, and the way in which our egalitarianism is manifested in impartial norms that protect against bullying and domination. These features of what is deemed “the Modern Egalitarian Package” allow it to be scaled up to large impersonal moral networks.

Contextualised strong reciprocity explains selfless cooperation despite selfish intuitions and weak social heuristics

Humans frequently cooperate for collective benefit, even in one-shot social dilemmas. This provides a challenge for theories of cooperation. Two views focus on intuitions but offer conflicting explanations. The Social Heuristics Hypothesis argues that people with selfish preferences rely on cooperative intuitions and predicts that deliberation reduces cooperation. The Self-Control Account emphasizes control over selfish intuitions and is consistent with strong reciprocity—a preference for conditional cooperation in one-shot dilemmas. Here, we reconcile these explanations with each other as well as with strong reciprocity. We study one-shot cooperation across two main dilemma contexts, provision and maintenance, and show that cooperation is higher in provision than maintenance. Using time-limit manipulations, we experimentally study the cognitive processes underlying this robust result. Supporting the Self-Control Account, people are intuitively selfish in maintenance, with deliberation increasing cooperation. In contrast, consistent with the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, deliberation tends to increase the likelihood of free-riding in provision. Contextual differences between maintenance and provision are observed across additional measures: reaction time patterns of cooperation; social dilemma understanding; perceptions of social appropriateness; beliefs about others’ cooperation; and cooperation preferences. Despite these dilemma-specific asymmetries, we show that preferences, coupled with beliefs, successfully predict the high levels of cooperation in both maintenance and provision dilemmas. While the effects of intuitions are context-dependent and small, the widespread preference for strong reciprocity is the primary driver of one-shot cooperation. We advance the Contextualised Strong Reciprocity account as a unifying framework and consider its implications for research and policy.

Human-robot cooperation in economic games: People show strong reciprocity but conditional prosociality toward robots

Understanding human social interactions with robots is important for designing robots for social tasks. Here, we investigate undergraduate participants’ situational cooperation tendencies towards a robot opponent using prisoner’s dilemma games. With two conditions where incentives for cooperative decisions were manipulated to be high or low, we predicted that people would cooperate more often with the robot in high-incentive conditions. Our results showed incentive structure did not predict human cooperation overall, but did influence cooperation in early rounds, where participants cooperated significantly more in the high-incentive condition. Exploratory analyses revealed other two behavioural tendencies: (1) participants played a tit-for-tat strategy against the robot (whose decisions were random); and (2) participants only behaved prosocially toward the robot when they had achieved high scores themselves. Our findings highlight ways in which social behaviour toward robots might differ from social behaviour toward humans, and inform future work on human–robot interactions in collaborative contexts.

Just Hierarchy between States

This chapter discusses relations between states. Whereas relations between rulers and citizens in countries should be characterized first and foremost by actions that benefit the citizens, relations between countries need to be mutually beneficial for both countries. Notwithstanding lip service paid to the ideal of equality between sovereign states in the modern world, this chapter argues that hierarchy between powerful and weaker states is the norm in international relations. Such hierarchical relations can be justified if they benefit both powerful and weaker states. The chapter draws on a mixture of philosophy and history to argue that justifiable hierarchical relations can be characterized by either weak reciprocity, with both countries deriving instrumental benefits from hierarchical relations, or strong reciprocity, with decision makers in stronger and weaker states thinking of their relations from the perspective of both states—not just from the perspective of their own state. Strong reciprocity is more difficult to achieve, but it is more stable and long lasting than weak reciprocity. In terms of the future, the chapter illustrates that an ideal of “one world, two hierarchical systems” may be appropriate for future forms of global order.