Punishment can promote defection in group-structured populations
Simon T. Powers, Daniel J. Taylor, Joanna J. Bryson
TL;DR
This paper demonstrates that anti-social punishment can hinder the development of cooperation and pro-social punishment in group-structured populations, challenging previous assumptions about the evolution of cooperation.
Contribution
It provides a formal analysis of how group size and dispersal influence the evolution of anti-social and pro-social punishment, revealing that anti-social punishment can prevent cooperation.
Findings
Anti-social punishment can inhibit pro-social punishment.
Group structure does not necessarily favor cooperation.
Anti-social punishment is widespread across human cultures.
Abstract
Pro-social punishment, whereby cooperators punish defectors, is often suggested as a mechanism that maintains cooperation in large human groups. Importantly, models that support this idea have to date only allowed defectors to be the target of punishment. However, recent empirical work has demonstrated the existence of anti-social punishment in public goods games. That is, individuals that defect have been found to also punish cooperators. Some recent theoretical studies have found that such anti-social punishment can prevent the evolution of pro-social punishment and cooperation. However, the evolution of anti-social punishment in group-structured populations has not been formally addressed. Previous work has informally argued that group-structure must favour pro-social punishment. Here we formally investigate how two demographic factors, group size and dispersal frequency, affect…
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