I’m a little confused. The explanation you give would explain why people might punish pro-social punishers, but it doesn’t really give insight into why they would punish cooperators. Is the argument that cooperators are likely to also be pro-social punishers? Or am I misunderstanding the structure of the game?
You are living in Soviet Union. Your father was sent to gulag, your mother was fired from her job in academia and sent to plow the tselina. You are being harrassed by the secret police. Then you meet a stachanovite who fulfilled the government plan to 200%. That guy is clearly a cooperator, producing more stuff you could benefit from, but you suddenly feel an irresistible urge to punch him in the nose.
I don’t fully understand the mechanism on the theoretical level myself, but it seems to have something to do with the assumptions about authority. If you assume that authority is naturally malevolent you are going to try to oppose it. “This is not my game. This is a game set up by the authorities. By those scientist guys. What can I possibly do to disrupt it?” Punishing cooperators seems to be an obvious way to do that.
Possibly related phenomena:
Lizardmen syndrome.
Boaty McBoatface syndrome.
Some kids being disruptive in school, just for disruption’s sake.
When cooperatebot is an asset being farmed by an adversary, it’s advantageous to destroy it. Favoring prosociality in games with unknown agendas contains a cooperatebot component.
I’m not sure the authority has to be malevolent, it could be incompetent (or something).
So:
[authority / authority-wielders are my enemies / outgroup] & [collaborators side with rules / rulemakers / authority] ⇒ collaborators are my outgroup ⇒ I punish them
This seems to predict that people who distrust authority more will punish cooperators more.
The bottom half of the punishment graph does seem to be places where I would distrust authority more.
The original study has something to say about ingroups/outgroups. It’s not exactly the same thing as the one we are discussing here but still:
Punishment may be also related to in-group–out-group distinctions
(37) because people might retaliate if punished by an out-group member (38). Societies also differ in the extent to which their social structures are governed by in-group–out-group distinctions. For instance, according to some cross-cultural psychologists (15, 39) in “collectivist” societies
many interactions are confined to close-knit social networks, whereas in “individualistic” societies interactions are more permeable across social
groups. Because in our experiment all participants were strangers to one another, people in collectivist societies might be more inclined than people in individualistic societies to perceive other participants as out-group members. Therefore, antisocial punishment might be stronger in collectivist than in individualistic societies. Our evidence is consistent with this possibility because in regressions similar to those of Table 2 antisocial punishment is highly significantly correlated with a widely used societal level measure of individualism-collectivism (15) (table S10).
A slightly broader theory: being too cooperative makes live easy for the non cooperators (the state in the Soviet Union case, but it also works in cases when people fall for some stupid maniulations). There must be many equilibria and some cultures stay at some middle level, they don’t aim at the most productive ones out of fear not to be pushed into the least productive.
I’m a little confused. The explanation you give would explain why people might punish pro-social punishers, but it doesn’t really give insight into why they would punish cooperators. Is the argument that cooperators are likely to also be pro-social punishers? Or am I misunderstanding the structure of the game?
You are living in Soviet Union. Your father was sent to gulag, your mother was fired from her job in academia and sent to plow the tselina. You are being harrassed by the secret police. Then you meet a stachanovite who fulfilled the government plan to 200%. That guy is clearly a cooperator, producing more stuff you could benefit from, but you suddenly feel an irresistible urge to punch him in the nose.
I don’t fully understand the mechanism on the theoretical level myself, but it seems to have something to do with the assumptions about authority. If you assume that authority is naturally malevolent you are going to try to oppose it. “This is not my game. This is a game set up by the authorities. By those scientist guys. What can I possibly do to disrupt it?” Punishing cooperators seems to be an obvious way to do that.
Possibly related phenomena:
Lizardmen syndrome.
Boaty McBoatface syndrome.
Some kids being disruptive in school, just for disruption’s sake.
When cooperatebot is an asset being farmed by an adversary, it’s advantageous to destroy it. Favoring prosociality in games with unknown agendas contains a cooperatebot component.
I’m not sure the authority has to be malevolent, it could be incompetent (or something).
So: [authority / authority-wielders are my enemies / outgroup] & [collaborators side with rules / rulemakers / authority] ⇒ collaborators are my outgroup ⇒ I punish them
This seems to predict that people who distrust authority more will punish cooperators more.
The bottom half of the punishment graph does seem to be places where I would distrust authority more.
The original study has something to say about ingroups/outgroups. It’s not exactly the same thing as the one we are discussing here but still:
++
A slightly broader theory: being too cooperative makes live easy for the non cooperators (the state in the Soviet Union case, but it also works in cases when people fall for some stupid maniulations). There must be many equilibria and some cultures stay at some middle level, they don’t aim at the most productive ones out of fear not to be pushed into the least productive.