Punishment has some side effects unrelated to its official goal. It signals that the punisher has higher status than the person being punished. (You rarely see weak people punishing strong people, or unpopular people publicly punishing popular people.) So the evolutionary reason for person X supporting situations where they have opportunity to punish person Y, is simply that doing so increases X’s status, regardless of what the actual effect on Y is.
In other words, it has the actual effect. It’s just a different effect, and on a different person.
So punishment originally had an effect of discouragement of behaviour that the punisher did not like. Then since only those who were higher status could get away with punishing others it developed the status-signalling effects too, and now that status signalling is the primary purpose.
Punishment has some side effects unrelated to its official goal. It signals that the punisher has higher status than the person being punished. (You rarely see weak people punishing strong people, or unpopular people publicly punishing popular people.) So the evolutionary reason for person X supporting situations where they have opportunity to punish person Y, is simply that doing so increases X’s status, regardless of what the actual effect on Y is.
In other words, it has the actual effect. It’s just a different effect, and on a different person.
So punishment originally had an effect of discouragement of behaviour that the punisher did not like. Then since only those who were higher status could get away with punishing others it developed the status-signalling effects too, and now that status signalling is the primary purpose.
That makes sense. Thanks.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a temporal sequence. Punishment as social control and as status enforcement could have evolved simultaneously.