COOPERATION,
PUNISHMENT AND
PROSOCIALITY
OUTLINE
 Cooperation and social norm following/enforcement
 Models of reciprocity
 Direct vs. indirect
 Weak vs. strong (self- vs. other-regarding)
 Norm enforcement via Punishment
 Costly punishment – second vs. third (direct vs. indirect)
 Roots of justice?
 Prosocial mechanisms
 Empathy, in-group altruism to out-group bias
 Hormonal influence
SOCIAL NORMS
 establish, transmit and enforce social norms. Social norms—
widely shared sentiments about what constitutes appropriate
behavior—comprise a basic “grammar of social interaction ”:
sets of prescribed and proscribed rules that serve to foster
social peace, stabilize cooperation and enhance prosperity
LIMITS OF DIRECT RECIPROCIT Y
 Direct reciprocity (reciprocal altruism)
 cooperation in bilateral interactions, even when initially costly, is
incentivized owing to the selfish benefits that may be accrued in the
long-term
 cooperation under direct reciprocity models is only evolutionarily
stable in small groups (<10);
 empirical data suggests that natural selection wouldn't favor
cooperation by reciprocal altruism among unrelated individuals on
the scale of human culture 5 . Theories of indirect reciprocity focus
instead on the self-interest that is served by accruing a good
reputation through altruistic behavior.
INDIRECT RECIPROCIT Y
 Weak reciprocity (self -regarding)
 self-interest that is served by accruing a good reputation through
altruistic behavior.
 potential of indirect reciprocity for explaining the emergence, among
humans, of cooperation among nonrelatives.
 the biological basis of morality;
 major motivation for language, gossip being a way of spreading
reputations (Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis)
 The advent of e-commerce provides the other reason why
understanding the assessment of reputations matters: the
prevalence of anonymous one-shot interactions in global markets
raises the issues of trust building and moral hazard
SIMPLE MODEL
 attach a binary score (“Good” or “Bad”) to each individual in
the population.
 From time to time, two individuals meet randomly, one as
donor, the other as recipient. At some cost c to one's own
payof f, the donor can help the recipient, i.e., increase the
recipient's payof f by a benefit b>c.
 In that case, the donor's score will be Good in the eyes of all
observers, whereas the score of a donor refusing to confer the
benefit will be Bad.
 A discriminating strategy of helping only those with a Good
score would channel benefits toward those who help and
discourage defectors.
COSTLY VS. NONCOSTLY PUNISHMENT
 A discriminator who refuses to help recipients with a Bad
score receives a Bad score and risks getting no help in the
next round.
 In this sense, punishing defectors by withholding help is
costly. Can such a trait evolve? Would it not be advantageous
to distinguish justifiable defections (against a Bad recipient)
from nonjustifiable defections (against a Good recipient) and
attach a Bad score only to the latter?
 This would constitute a noncostly form of punishment and
would greatly alleviate the discriminator's task. But such a
distinction requires considerable cognitive capacities. Not
only the recipient's past but also that of the recipient's
recipients, etc., must be taken into account .
 second-order social dilemma: free-ride on others punishment
LIMITATIONS OF INDIRECT RECIPROCIT Y
 Can reputation account for widespread nature of human cooperation
where one-shot (unrepeated) interactions are common and attendant
reputational benefits likely to be small?
STRONG RECIPROCIT Y
 ”Homo reciprocans cares about the well -being of other s and about the
processes determining outcomes --whether they are fair, for example, or
violate a social norm. He dif fers in this from the self -regarding and
outcome-oriented Homo economicus” -Gintis
 long-term widespread cooperation is made possible by the presence of
“strong reciprocator s”: individuals who reward norm -followers (for
example, cooperators) and punish norm -violators (for example,
defectors) even when such actions are costly, and in the absence of any
material future gain for the strong reciprocator
 Self-regarding vs. prosocial, other-regarding preferences – altrusitic
cooperation and costly punishment - search for biological prosocial
processes (e.g., empathy)
 capacity to learn norms; integrate predictions about norm -related
action outcomes into decision making to guide their own behavior;
assess other individuals' beliefs, desires and behavior in the context of
these norms; and use subjective responses to norm violations to
appropriately sanction defection .
THIRD PART Y PUNISHMENT
 individuals will accept costs to sanction individuals who have
violated fairness and distribution norms even when they were
not directly af fected by the norm violation
 “Moralistic punishment in humans is an evolutionary mystery
because it is performed by third parties. This raises the key
question: Why do people care about interactions among
unrelated others? Given that punishment is costly and can
potentially draw retaliation, appears to be a tendency that
would be selected against, raising the issue of how
adaptations that give rise to moralistic punishment evolved.”
–Kurzban
 Alternative: moralistic punishment is reputation -enhancing
(self-regarding)
PUNISHMENT 1-9
 John plans to be a gangster for a Halloween of fice party. He
buys suitable clothing, as well as a small loaded gun. The gun
looks like a toy, and John plans to use it to kill a rival, and
then claim it was an accident. He later shoots his rival, who
dies of the injuries
 John has a license to hunt deer with his licensed rifle. One
day, he sees a deer, takes aim, and shoots – missing the deer
but killing a distant hunter. The deceased hunter had not
complied with important state safety regulations. In
particular, he was not wearing “hunter orange” to distinguish
himself from target animals.
COGNITIVE & EMOTIONAL COMPONENTS
 cognitive processes involved in determination of
responsibility
 prefrontal activity was linked to a categorical aspect of legal
decision-making (deciding whether or not to punish on the basis of
criminal responsibility
 Emotional processes involved in magnitude of punishment
 amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulated cortex)
consistently linked to social and emotional processing is associated
with the amount of assigned punishment during legal decision making.
PROSOCIALIT Y: EMPATHY
 Capacity to share emotional state of other s
 Key motivator, proximate mechanism for altruistic behavior whereby an
individual perceives and shares in the distress of another per son, and
acts to reduce his or her suf fering
 simulation theories of empathy which suggest that humans understand
(i.e., ‘simulate’) other s’ emotional states by imagining what they
themselves would feel in a similar situation
 Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more
basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with
af fective communication, social attachment, and parental care.
 Empathy has been shown to var y depending on interindividual
dif ferences (Chiao et al., 2009; Singer et al., 2004), as well as on
subjective judgments of targets made by perceiver s (Singer et al .,
2006).
 Caring for others draws on general mammalian neural
systems of reward and social attachment. Moreover, empathy
is not unique to humans, as many of the biological
mechanisms are shared with other mammalian species.
However, humans are special in the sense that high -level
cognitive abilities, such as executive function, language, and
mentalizing, implemented by the prefrontal cortex, are
layered on top of phylogenetically older social and emotional
capacities. These evolutionarily newer aspects of information
processing expand the range of behaviors that can be driven
by empathy, and expand flexibility like caring for and helping
outgroup members or even individuals from dif ferent species.
Empathy draws on a
large array of
neurobiological
systems that are
not limited to the
cortex (insula,
anterior cingulate
cortex, and
orbitofrontal
cortex), but also the
midbrain (e.g.,
periaqueductal
gray) and
brainstem, and
includes the
autonomic nervous
system (ANS), HPA
axis, and endocrine
systems that
regulate bodily
states, emotion,
and reactivity.
T H E N E U R O E V O L U T I O N O F E M PAT H Y
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
Volume 1231, Issue 1, pages 35-45, 8 JUN 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x/full#f2
EMPATHY FOR SOCIAL EXCLUSION
 Does self-other overlap enhances vicarious af fect sharing
during empathy for social pain. We predicted that participants
would show activation in the af fective pain regions when
observing a friend (someone with a high -degree of self-other
overlap) experience social exclusion, and
 MPFC activation
Figure 4. Brain
Regions Significantly
Active in the
Interaction Contrast
Comparing a
Friend’s Exclusion >
Inclusion to a
Stranger’s Exclusion
> Inclusion
Figure 3. Brain
Regions during a
Friend’s Exclusion
Predicted by SelfOther Overlap Scores
EXTRAORDINARY EMPATHY
 Under certain circumstances, people display extraordinary
empathy and altruism. One route to enhanced empathy and
altruism is through the increased inclusion of another person
in the conception of the self (Aron et al., 2004).
 Care for one's social ingroup, resulting in ingroup loyalty or
ingroup solidarity, may be an example of extraordinary
empathy that is brought about by including other group
members as part of one's self concept.
STIMULUS
EMPATHY
 (A.) Main effect of pain
[Pain > No Pain], y = 18.
(B., C.) Independent
regression analyses [(B.)
ACC regression
performed on peak voxel:
3, − 9, 45; (C.) right AI
regression performed on
39, 12, 5] of [Pain > No
Pain] with empathy rating
as the covariate. ROIs
defined by [Pain > No
Pain] contrast.
s i g ni fi c a n t l y
g r e a te r a c t i v i t y
within MPFC
regions in AA
relative CA
p a r t i c ip a n t s
when judging
e m p a t hy f o r
i n g r o up r e l a t i ve
to o u t g r o up
t a r g et s .
EXTRAORDINARY EMPATHY
 empathy was associated with affective neural response with the
ACC and bilateral insula, irrespective of social group
membership (i.e., race).
 African- Americans who experienced greater empathy for ingroup
members relative to Caucasian - Americans in pain also showed
greater response within the MPFC for ingroup relative to
outgroup members in pain.
 Additionally, across individuals, activity within the MPFC when
perceiving pain expressed by ingroup relative to outgroup
members predicted the degree to which people demonstrated an
ingroup bias in empathy and altruistic motivation at a behavioral
level.
 Whereas empathy for humankind is associated with affective
empathic processing, the current findings demonstrate that
extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation for members of
one's own social group is associated with cognitive empathic
processing.
STEREOT YPES AND MORAL JUDGMENT
increased
activity for
s a c r i fi c in g l o w
warmth, low
c o m p ete nc e to
s av e h i g h
warmth, high
c o m pete nc e
 Specifically, 88% of people say the act is unacceptable when
the targets are unidentified (Hauser et al., 2007), indicating
most people’s default is moral aversion to the sacrifice. We
reverse this pattern by manipulating the warmth and
competence of the targets involved: 84% of our respondents
say it is acceptable for Joe to push a low -warmth, low competence person of f a bridge to save five high -warmth,
high-competence targets.
 override their moral aversion to sacrificing low -warmth, low competence targets or whether they experience less moral
aversion to override in the first place.
HORMONAL BASIS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIO
 Prosocial behavior
 vasopressin (AVP)/oxytocin desire or ‘seeking’, reward, fear
and aggression, af filiation and cooperation, courtship and
mating, and parental care.
 Social recognition
 Social bonding
 Assessment of the social environment
 Social memory and learning
 Temporal discounting
 Partner choice
HORMONES
P OA , p r e o p t i c
area; Mid,
midbrain; VMH,
ventromedial
hy p o t h a l a m us ;
A H , a n te r i o r
hy p o t h a l a m us ;
L S , l a te r a l
s e p t um ; e M A ,
ex te n d e d
m e d i a l a my g d a l
HORMONAL INFLUENCES & STATUS
GOODS