Journal
EVOLUTION AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR
Volume 36, Issue 2, Pages 86-94Publisher
ELSEVIER SCIENCE INC
DOI: 10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.09.004
Keywords
Costly punishment; Cultural transmission; Children; Cooperation
Funding
- Erasmus Mundus Masters Scholarship from the European Union
- National Research Fund, Luxembourg
- Marie Curie Actions of the European Commission (FP7-COFUND)
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and SSHRC
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Evolutionary theorists argue that cultural evolution has harnessed various aspects of our evolved psychology to create a variety of different mechanisms for sustaining social norms, including those related to large-scale cooperation. One of these mechanisms, costly punishment, has emerged in experiments as an effective means to sustain cooperation in some societies. If this view is correct, individuals' willingness to engage in the costly punishment of norm violators should be culturally transmittable, and applicable to both prosocial and anti-social behaviors (to any social norm). Since much existing work shows that norm-based prosocial behavior in experiments develops substantially during early and middle childhood, we tested 245 3- to 8-year olds in a simplified third party punishment game to investigate whether children would-imitate a model's decision to punish, at a personal cost, both unequal and equal offers. Our study showed that children, regardless of their age, imitate the costly punishment of both equal and unequal offers, and the rates of imitation increase (not decrease) with age. However, only older children imitate not-punishing for both equal and unequal offers. These findings highlight the potential role of cultural transmission in the stabilization or de-stabilization of costly punishment in a population. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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