Why people punish defectors. Weak conformist transmission can stabilize costly enforcement of norms in cooperative dilemmas.

By Joseph Henrich, Robert Boyd. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2001

769 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eed3153c1fa776ddd97f8020577012ea2979f97

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Citations in the corpus

Foundations of Human Sociality - Economic Experiments and Ethnographic: Evidence From Fifteen Small-Scale Societies (2004, background): “Finally, these empirical results have motivated a number of attempts to explain the long-term evolutionary success of non-selfish behaviors (Caporael et al. 1989; Simon 1990; Sober and Wilson 1994; Gintis 2000b, 2003a, b; Boyd et al. 2001; Gintis, Smith, and Bowles 2001; Henrich and Boyd 2001).”
The Influence of Social Norms on Consumer Behavior: A Meta-Analysis (2021, background): “Namely, a request that activates a kin care motive reduces reactance and promotes compliance without expectations of reciprocation (Griskevicius and Kenrick 2013; Henrich and Boyd 2001).”
Behavioral Norms: Variants and Their Identification (2014, background): “Indeed, some researchers even propose higher-order sanctions: punishing group members who fail to punish norm violators (Boyd & Richerson, 1992; Henrich & Boyd, 2001).”
Accepting Authoritative Decisions: Humans as Wary Cooperators (2004, background): “Typically, for example, people are more than willing to take a loss themselves in order to punish someone who has behaved badly or to cooperate with someone who has behaved nobly (see, for example, Boyd and Richerson 1992; Henrich and Boyd 2001; Thaler 1992).”
Information-Sharing in Academia and the Industry: A Comparative Study (2011, background): “Scholars therefore assert an intermingling (Rhoten and Powell, 2007; Hicks, 1995) and some go so far as to claim that they observe an institutional convergence between academia and the industry (Vallas and Kleinman, 2008).”
CRITICAL POINTS IN CURRENT THEORY OF CONFORMIST SOCIAL LEARNING (2007, background): “The case of punishment is particularly interesting since it has been proposed that costly punishment of social defectors can be maintained by conformist transmission of the punishing behaviour, hence solving the problem of how prosocial behaviour can evolve (HENRICH and BOYD 2001).”
Reputational benefits for altruistic punishment (2006, background): “…multiple PGG rounds allows for the possibility of bsecond-order punishingQ (i.e., punishing nonpunishers), which several theorists suggest is a significant force in maintaining the existence of punishment and cooperation (e.g., Bendor & Swistak, 2001; Henrich & Boyd, 2001; Sober & Wilson, 1998).”
Culture and social behavior (2015, methodology): “This powerful tool has already been deployed to understand the emergence of a wide range of social norms and institutions, including those related to social stratification [65], ethnic groups [66], cultures of honor [67], signaling systems [68], punishment [69–71] and various reputational systems [7”