Costly punishment does not always increase cooperation.
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.
Wu
Jia-Jia
JJ
Key Laboratory of Animal Ecology and Conservation Biology, Centre for Computational Biology and Evolution, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
Zhang
Bo-Yu
BY
Zhou
Zhen-Xing
ZX
He
Qiao-Qiao
QQ
Zheng
Xiu-Deng
XD
Cressman
Ross
R
Tao
Yi
Y
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