title: Costly punishment does not always increase cooperation.
abstract: In a pairwise interaction, an individual who uses costly punishment must pay a cost in order that the opponent incurs a cost. It has been argued that individuals will behave more cooperatively if they know that their opponent has the option of using costly punishment. We examined this hypothesis by conducting two repeated two-player Prisoner's Dilemma experiments, that differed in their payoffs associated to cooperation, with university students from Beijing as participants. In these experiments, the level of cooperation either stayed the same or actually decreased when compared with the control experiments in which costly punishment was not an option. We argue that this result is likely due to differences in cultural attitudes to cooperation and punishment based on similar experiments with university students from Boston that found cooperation did increase with costly punishment.
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Centre for Computational Biology and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
authors.forename: Jia-Jia
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Bo-Yu
authors.initials: BY
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Zhen-Xing
authors.initials: ZX
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Qiao-Qiao
authors.initials: QQ
authors.lastname: He
authors.forename: Xiu-Deng
authors.initials: XD
authors.lastname: Zheng
authors.forename: Ross
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Cressman
authors.forename: Yi
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Tao
mesh_terms: D000533:Altruism; D001290:Attitude; D001521:Behavior Therapy; D002681:China; D003431:Cross-Cultural Comparison; D005260:Female; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D010349:Patient Compliance; D011678:Punishment; D013334:Students; D014481:United States; D014495:Universities; D055815:Young Adult