title: Costs and benefits in hunter-gatherer punishment.
abstract: Hunter-gatherer punishment involves costs and benefits to individuals and groups, but the costs do not necessarily fit with the assumptions made in models that consider punishment to be altruistic--which brings in the free-rider problem and the problem of second-order free-riders. In this commentary, I present foragers' capital punishment patterns ethnographically, in the interest of establishing whether such punishment is likely to be costly; and I suggest that in many cases abstentions from punishment that might be taken as defections by free-riders are actually caused by social-structural considerations rather than being an effect of free-rider genes. This presentation of data supplements the ethnographic analysis provided by Guala.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. cboehm1@msn.com
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Boehm
mesh_terms: D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005716:Game Theory; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011678:Punishment / Q000523:psychology*; D012919:Social Behavior