One of those concepts is the idea that we evolved to “punish the non-punishers”, in order to ensure the costs of social punishment are shared by everyone.
Before thinking of how to present this idea, I would study carefully whether it’s true. I understand there is some disagreement regarding the origins of third-party punishment. There is a big literature on this. I won’t discuss it in detail, but here are some examples of perspectives which deviate from that taken in the quoted passage.
This only makes sense as cultural evolution. Not much third party punishment in many small-scale societies .
So in Henrich’s view, we didn’t even (biologically) evolve to punish wrong-doers (as third parties), let alone non-punishers. Third-party punishment is a result of cultural, not biological, evolution, in his view.
A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself.
Here, we searched for evidence of altruistic punishment in an experiment that precluded these artefacts. In so doing, we found that victims of unfairness punished transgressors, whereas witnesses of unfairness did not. Furthermore, witnesses’ emotional reactions to unfairness were characterized by envy of the unfair individual’s selfish gains rather than by moralistic anger towards the unfair behaviour. In a second experiment run independently in two separate samples, we found that previous evidence for altruistic punishment plausibly resulted from affective forecasting error—that is, limitations on humans’ abilities to accurately simulate how they would feel in hypothetical situations. Together, these findings suggest that the case for altruistic punishment in humans—a view that has gained increasing attention in the biological and social sciences—has been overstated.
Before thinking of how to present this idea, I would study carefully whether it’s true.
I’m probably referring to the idea in a much narrower context, specifically our inclination to express outrage (or even just mild disapproval) as a form of low-cost, low-risk social punishment, and for that inclination to apply just as well to people who appear insufficiently disapproving or outraged.
The targets of this inclination may vary culturally, and it might be an artifact or side-effect of the hardware, but I’d be surprised if there were societies where nothing was ever a subject that people disapproved of other people not being disapproving of. Disapproving of the same things is a big part of what draws societies together in the first place, so failing to disapprove of the common enemy seems like something that automatically makes you “probably the enemy”.
(But my reasons and evidence for thinking this way will probably be clearer in the actual article, as it’s about patterns of motivated reasoning that seem to reliably pop up in certain circumstances… but then again my examples are not terribly diverse, culturally speaking.)
Unfortunately, these results do not make the evolution of adaptations for collective action any less mysterious. Because punishing a free rider would generally have entailed some nontrivial cost, each potential punisher has an incentive to defect—that is, to avoid this cost by not punishing acts of free riding. Thus, the provision of punishment is itself a public good: Each individual has an incentive to free ride on the punishment activities of others. Hence, second-order free riders should be fitter (or better off) than punishers. Without a way of solving this second-order free rider problem, cooperation should unravel, with nonparticipation and nonpunishment the equilibrium outcome. Even worse, this problem reappears at each new level, revealing an infinite regress problem: Punishment needs to be visited on free riders on the original public good, and on those who do not punish free riders, and on those who do not punish those who do not punish free riders, and so on.
Before thinking of how to present this idea, I would study carefully whether it’s true. I understand there is some disagreement regarding the origins of third-party punishment. There is a big literature on this. I won’t discuss it in detail, but here are some examples of perspectives which deviate from that taken in the quoted passage.
Joe Henrich writes:
So in Henrich’s view, we didn’t even (biologically) evolve to punish wrong-doers (as third parties), let alone non-punishers. Third-party punishment is a result of cultural, not biological, evolution, in his view.
Another paper of potential relevance by Tooby and Cosmides and others:
Another paper by Pedersen, Kurzban and McCullough argues that the case for altruistic punishment is overstated.
I’m probably referring to the idea in a much narrower context, specifically our inclination to express outrage (or even just mild disapproval) as a form of low-cost, low-risk social punishment, and for that inclination to apply just as well to people who appear insufficiently disapproving or outraged.
The targets of this inclination may vary culturally, and it might be an artifact or side-effect of the hardware, but I’d be surprised if there were societies where nothing was ever a subject that people disapproved of other people not being disapproving of. Disapproving of the same things is a big part of what draws societies together in the first place, so failing to disapprove of the common enemy seems like something that automatically makes you “probably the enemy”.
(But my reasons and evidence for thinking this way will probably be clearer in the actual article, as it’s about patterns of motivated reasoning that seem to reliably pop up in certain circumstances… but then again my examples are not terribly diverse, culturally speaking.)
A different Cosmides-and-Tooby (and Michael E. Price) take: