Cultural Variation in Anti-Social Punishment
This website is under construction. It was originally built to help with
recruitment for the
three staff members. It will soon hold the
outcomes of the first nine months of research.
About the topic
Altruism
is defined technically as paying a cost in order to benefit another
individual. Altruistic
punishment is paying a cost to punish someone who is behaving in
a way that damages the collective good. Several researchers have
hypothesised that the human propensity to be
willing to perform altruistic punishment is part of the explanation for
what makes our species unique in terms of culture, language and
technology. But is altruistic punishment a cause or a consequence
of our uniqueness?
As it happens, at least some humans are also willing to pay a cost in
order to punish those who are benefiting
the collective good. This is called anti-social
punishment. In 2008, Herrmann,
Thöni
&
Gächter
(Science,
2008) demonstrated that the
tendency for anti-social punishment varies by geographic region, though
the tendency for altruistic punishment does not.
About the researchers
The Artifical Models of Natural Intelligence (AmonI) research group has
been exploring the theoretical biology of human culture for some time.
We have recently been funded to collaborate with the Nottingham Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics (CeDEx)
to understand cultural variation in anti-social punishment. CeDEx
is one of the leading behavioural economics groups in the world, and is
the research home for both Herrmann
and Gächter.
The positions
-
- Simon Powers has
held this position since 2 May 2011.
- Pablo Lucas held this position from October 2010 –
March 2011. He then took a different postdoctoral research position in
Helsinki, Finland.
-
-
This effort is sponsored by the US
Air
Force
Office
of
Scientific Research, Air Force Material Command, USAF, under grant number
FA8655-10-1-3050. It is funded specifically to address
questions at two
levels:
- Substantial:
we
want
a
better
understanding
of why there should be geographic variation
in what at least superficially appears to be a maladaptive economic
behaviour (anti-social punishment).
- Methodological:
we
want
to
improve
the current
methodologicaly state of the art in collaboration between social
simulation / agent based modelling and the social sciences.
page author: Joanna Bryson
last updated: 20 May 2011