COOPERATION,

PUNISHMENT AND

PROSOCIALITY

Cooperation and social norm following/enforcement

Models of reciprocity

Direct vs. indirect

Weak vs. strong (self- vs. other-regarding)

Norm enforcement via Punishment

Costly punishment – second vs. third (direct vs. indirect)

Roots of justice?

Prosocial mechanisms

Empathy, in-group altruism to out-group bias

Hormonal influence

OUTLINE

establish, transmit and enforce social norms. Social norms—

widely shared sentiments about what constitutes appropriate

behavior—comprise a basic “grammar of social interaction ”:

sets of prescribed and proscribed rules that serve to foster

social peace, stabilize cooperation and enhance prosperity

SOCIAL NORMS

Direct reciprocity (reciprocal altruism)

cooperation in bilateral interactions, even when initially costly, is

incentivized owing to the selfish benefits that may be accrued in the

long-term

cooperation under direct reciprocity models is only evolutionarily

stable in small groups (<10);

empirical data suggests that natural selection wouldn't favor

cooperation by reciprocal altruism among unrelated individuals on

the scale of human culture5. Theories of indirect reciprocity focus

instead on the self-interest that is served by accruing a good

reputation through altruistic behavior.

LIMITS OF DIRECT RECIPROCITY

Weak reciprocity (self -regarding)

self-interest that is served by accruing a good reputation through

altruistic behavior.

potential of indirect reciprocity for explaining the emergence, among

humans, of cooperation among nonrelatives.

the biological basis of morality;

major motivation for language, gossip being a way of spreading

reputations (Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis)

The advent of e-commerce provides the other reason why

understanding the assessment of reputations matters: the

prevalence of anonymous one-shot interactions in global markets

raises the issues of trust building and moral hazard

INDIRECT RECIPROCITY

attach a binary score (“Good” or “Bad”) to each individual in

the population.

From time to time, two individuals meet randomly, one as

donor, the other as recipient. At some cost c to one's own

payoff, the donor can help the recipient, i .e., increase the

recipient's payoff by a benefit b>c .

In that case, the donor's score will be Good in the eyes of all

observers, whereas the score of a donor refusing to confer the

benefit will be Bad.

A discriminating strategy of helping only those with a Good

score would channel benefits toward those who help and

discourage defectors.

SIMPLE MODEL

A discriminator who refuses to help recipients with a Bad score receives a Bad score and risks getting no help in the next round.

In this sense, punishing defectors by withholding help is costly. Can such a trait evolve? Would it not be advantageous to distinguish justifiable defections (against a Bad recipient) from nonjustifiable defections (against a Good recipient) and attach a Bad score only to the latter?

This would constitute a noncostly form of punishment and would greatly alleviate the discriminator's task. But such a distinction requires considerable cognitive capacities. Not only the recipient's past but also that of the recipient's recipients, etc., must be taken into account .

second-order social dilemma: free-ride on others punishment

COSTLY VS. NONCOSTLY PUNISHMENT

Can reputation account for widespread nature of human cooperation

where one-shot (unrepeated) interactions are common and attendant

reputational benefits likely to be small?

LIMITATIONS OF INDIRECT RECIPROCITY

”Homo reciprocans cares about the well -being of others and about the processes determining outcomes--whether they are fair, for example, or violate a social norm. He dif fers in this from the self -regarding and outcome-oriented Homo economicus” -Gintis

long-term widespread cooperation is made possible by the presence of “strong reciprocators”: individuals who reward norm - followers (for example, cooperators) and punish norm-violators (for example, defectors) even when such actions are costly, and in the absence of any material future gain for the strong reciprocator

Self -regarding vs. prosocial , other-regarding preferences – altrusit iccooperation and costly punishment - search for biological prosocialprocesses (e.g. , empathy)

capacity to learn norms; integrate predictions about norm -related action outcomes into decision making to guide their own behavior; assess other individuals' bel iefs, desires and behavior in the context of these norms; and use subjective responses to norm violations to appropriately sanction defection.

STRONG RECIPROCITY

individuals will accept costs to sanction individuals who have

violated fairness and distribution norms even when they were

not directly affected by the norm violation

“Moralistic punishment in humans is an evolutionary mystery

because it is performed by third parties. This raises the key

question: Why do people care about interactions among

unrelated others? Given that punishment is costly and can

potentially draw retaliation, appears to be a tendency that

would be selected against, raising the issue of how

adaptations that give rise to moralistic punishment evolved .”

–Kurzban

Alternative: moralistic punishment is reputation-enhancing

(self-regarding)

THIRD PARTY PUNISHMENT

John plans to be a gangster for a Halloween office party. He

buys suitable clothing, as well as a small loaded gun. The gun

looks like a toy, and John plans to use it to kill a rival, and

then claim it was an accident. He later shoots his rival, who

dies of the injuries

John has a license to hunt deer with his licensed rifle. One

day, he sees a deer, takes aim, and shoots – missing the deer

but killing a distant hunter. The deceased hunter had not

complied with important state safety regulations. In

particular, he was not wearing “hunter orange” to distinguish

himself from target animals.

PUNISHMENT 1-9

cognitive processes involved in determination of

responsibility

prefrontal activity was linked to a categorical aspect of legal

decision-making (deciding whether or not to punish on the basis of

criminal responsibility

Emotional processes involved in magnitude of punishment

amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulated cortex)

consistently linked to social and emotional processing is associated

with the amount of assigned punishment during legal decision-

making.

COGNITIVE & EMOTIONAL COMPONENTS

Capacity to share emotional state of others

Key motivator, proximate mechanism for altruistic behavior whereby an individual perceives and shares in the distress of another person, and acts to reduce his or her suf fering

simulation theories of empathy which suggest that humans understand ( i .e. , ‘simulate’) others’ emotional states by imagining what they themselves would feel in a similar situation

Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with af fective communication, social attachment, and parental care.

Empathy has been shown to vary depending on interindividualdif ferences (Chiao et al . , 2009; Singer et al . , 2004), as well as on subjective judgments of targets made by perceivers (Singer et al . , 2006).

PROSOCIALITY: EMPATHY

Caring for others draws on general mammalian neural

systems of reward and social attachment. Moreover, empathy

is not unique to humans, as many of the biological

mechanisms are shared with other mammalian species.

However, humans are special in the sense that high-level

cognitive abilities, such as executive function, language, and

mentalizing, implemented by the prefrontal cortex, are

layered on top of phylogenetically older social and emotional

capacities. These evolutionarily newer aspects of information

processing expand the range of behaviors that can be driven

by empathy, and expand flexibility like caring for and helping

outgroup members or even individuals from dif ferent species.

E m p a t h y d r a w s o n a l a r g e a r r a y o f n e u r o b i o l o g i c a l s y s t e m s t h a t a r e n o t l i m i t e d t o t h e c o r t e x ( i n s u l a , a n t e r i o r c i n g u l a t e c o r t e x , a n d o r b i t o f r o n t a l c o r t e x ) , b u t a l s o t h e m i d b r a i n ( e . g . , p e r i a q u e d u c t a l g r a y ) a n d b r a i n s t e m , a n d i n c l u d e s t h e a u t o n o m i c n e r v o u s s y s t e m ( A N S ) , H P A a x i s , a n d e n d o c r i n e s y s t e m s t h a t r e g u l a t e b o d i l y s t a t e s , e m o t i o n , a n d r e a c t i v i t y .

T H E N E U RO E VO LUT I ON O F E M PAT H Y

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Volume 1231, Issue 1, pages 35-45, 8 JUN 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x/full#f2

Does self-other overlap enhances vicarious affect sharing

during empathy for social pain. We predicted that participants

would show activation in the affective pain regions when

observing a friend (someone with a high-degree of self-other

overlap) experience social exclusion, and

MPFC activation

EMPATHY FOR SOCIAL EXCLUSION

Figure 4. Brain

Regions Significantly

Active in the

Interaction Contrast

Comparing a

Friend’s Exclusion >

Inclusion to a

Stranger’s Exclusion

> Inclusion

Figure 3. Brain

Regions during a

Friend’s Exclusion

Predicted by Self-

Other Overlap Scores

Under certain circumstances, people display extraordinary

empathy and altruism. One route to enhanced empathy and

altruism is through the increased inclusion of another person

in the conception of the self (Aron et al., 2004).

Care for one's social ingroup, resulting in ingroup loyalty or

ingroup solidarity, may be an example of extraordinary

empathy that is brought about by including other group

members as part of one's self concept.

EXTRAORDINARY EMPATHY

STIMULUS

(A.) Main effect of pain [Pain > No Pain], y = 18. (B., C.) Independent regression analyses [(B.) ACC regression performed on peak voxel: 3, − 9, 45; (C.) right AI regression performed on 39, 12, 5] of [Pain > No Pain] with empathy rating as the covariate. ROIs defined by [Pain > No Pain] contrast.

EMPATHY

s igni f icant ly

g reater act iv i ty

w i th in MPFC

reg ions in AA

re lat ive CA

par t ic ipants

when judging

empathy for

ingroup relat ive

to outgroup

targets .

empathy was associated with affective neural response with the ACC and bilateral insula, irrespective of social group membership (i .e., race).

African-Americans who experienced greater empathy for ingroupmembers relative to Caucasian-Americans in pain also showed greater response within the MPFC for ingroup relative to outgroup members in pain.

Additionally, across individuals, activity within the MPFC when perceiving pain expressed by ingroup relative to outgroupmembers predicted the degree to which people demonstrated an ingroup bias in empathy and altruistic motivation at a behavioral level.

Whereas empathy for humankind is associated with affective empathic processing, the current findings demonstrate that extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation for members of one's own social group is associated with cognitive empathic processing.

EXTRAORDINARY EMPATHY

STEREOTYPES AND MORAL JUDGMENT

increased

act iv i ty for

sacr i f ic ing low

warmth, low

competence to

save h igh

warmth, h igh

competence

Specifically, 88% of people say the act is unacceptable when

the targets are unidentified (Hauser et al., 2007), indicating

most people’s default is moral aversion to the sacrifice. We

reverse this pattern by manipulating the warmth and

competence of the targets involved: 84% of our respondents

say it is acceptable for Joe to push a low -warmth, low-

competence person off a bridge to save five high-warmth,

high-competence targets.

override their moral aversion to sacrificing low -warmth, low-

competence targets or whether they experience less moral

aversion to override in the first place.

Prosocial behavior

vasopressin (AVP)/oxytocin desire or ‘seeking’, reward, fear

and aggression, af filiation and cooperation, courtship and

mating, and parental care.

Social recognition

Social bonding

Assessment of the social environment

Social memory and learning

Temporal discounting

Partner choice

HORMONAL BASIS OF SOCIAL BEHAVIO

POA , preopt ic

area; Mid ,

midbrain ; VMH,

vent romedia l

hypothalamus;

AH, anter ior

hypothalamus;

LS , latera l

septum; eMA ,

ex tended

medial amygdal

HORMONES

HORMONAL INFLUENCES & STATUS

GOODS