It has been argued that punishment promotes the evolution of cooperation when mutation rates are high (i.e. when agents engage in ‘exploration dynamics’). Mutations maintain a steady supply of agents that punish free-riders, and thus free-riders are at a disadvantage. Recent experiments,...

Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based account (Jordan et al., 2016)...

Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. But why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation concerns can shape moralistic...

Costly third party punishment has been interpreted as a tool for studying the enforcement of social norms. Experiments on this topic typically involve a third party observer who can pay to decrease the payoff of a player who has behaved selfishly (or generously) toward another. We investigate...

Institutional punishment plays a central role in human societies. Yet research in evolutionary game theory has focused almost exclusively on peer punishment. Here we present a model for the evolution of institutional punishment. We consider a set of states ('kingdoms'), each consisting of a...

People often punish norm violations. In what cases is such punishment viewed as normative—a behavior that we “should” or even “must” engage in? We approach this question by asking when people who fail to punish a norm violator are, themselves, punished. (For instance, a boss who fails...

Until recently, theorists considering the evolution of human cooperation have paid little attention to institutional punishment, a defining feature of large-scale human societies. Compared to individually administered punishment, institutional punishment offers a unique potential advantage: the...

Large-scale cooperation, or the willingness of individuals to incur costs in order to help others, is a defining trait of the human species. However, cooperation poses a theoretical puzzle: since it is individually costly to cooperate, it seems that natural selection should favor non-cooperation...