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  1. On the Free-Rider Identification Problem.Ronald J. Planer - 2015 - Biological Theory 10 (2):134-144.
    Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have argued that individual-selection accounts of human cooperation flounder in the face of the free-rider identification problem. Kim Sterelny has responded to this line of argument for group selection, arguing that the free-rider identification problem in fact poses no theoretical difficulty for individual-selection accounts. In this article, I set out to clarify Bowles and Gintis’ argument. As I see matters, the real crux of their argument is this: solving the free-rider identification problem, even in modestly (...)
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  • Nativism and the Evolutionary Debunking of Morality.Brendan Cline - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (2):231-253.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to undercut the justification of our moral judgments by showing why a tendency to make moral judgments would evolve regardless of the truth of those judgments. Machery and Mallon (2010. Evolution of morality. In J.M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group (Eds.), The Moral Psychology Handbook (pp. 3-46). Oxford: Oxford University Press) have recently tried to disarm these arguments by showing that moral cognition – in the sense that is relevant to debunking – is not (...)
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  • Reciprocity: Weak or strong? What punishment experiments do (and do not) demonstrate.Francesco Guala - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):1-15.
    Economists and biologists have proposed a distinction between two mechanisms – “strong” and “weak” reciprocity – that may explain the evolution of human sociality. Weak reciprocity theorists emphasize the benefits of long-term cooperation and the use of low-cost strategies to deter free-riders. Strong reciprocity theorists, in contrast, claim that cooperation in social dilemma games can be sustained by costly punishment mechanisms, even in one-shot and finitely repeated games. To support this claim, they have generated a large body of evidence concerning (...)
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  • Weak reciprocity alone cannot explain peer punishment.Marco Casari - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):21-22.
    The claims about (1) the lack of empirical support for a model of strong reciprocation and (2) the irrelevant empirical role of costly punishment to support cooperation in the field need qualifications. The interpretation of field evidence is not straightforward, and other-regarding preferences are also likely to play a role in the field.
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  • Mysteries of morality.Peter DeScioli & Robert Kurzban - 2009 - Cognition 112 (2):281-299.
    Evolutionary theories of morality, beginning with Darwin, have focused on explanations for altruism. More generally, these accounts have concentrated on conscience to the neglect of condemnation. As a result, few theoretical tools are available for understanding the rapidly accumulating data surrounding third-party judgment and punishment. Here we consider the strategic interactions among actors, victims, and third-parties to help illuminate condemnation. We argue that basic differences between the adaptive problems faced by actors and third-parties indicate that actor conscience and third-party condemnation (...)
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  • Explaining human altruism.Michael Vlerick - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2395-2413.
    Humans often behave altruistically towards strangers with no chance of reciprocation. From an evolutionary perspective, this is puzzling. The evolution of altruistic cooperative behavior—in which an organism’s action reduces its fitness and increases the fitness of another organism —only makes sense when it is directed at genetically related organisms or when one can expect the favor to be returned. Therefore, evolutionary theorists such as Sober and Wilson have argued that we should revise Neo-Darwininian evolutionary theory. They argue that human altruism (...)
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  • When the strong punish: Why net costs of punishment are often negligible.Christopher R. von Rueden & Michael Gurven - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):43-44.
    In small-scale societies, punishment of adults is infrequent and employed when the anticipated cost-to-benefit ratio is low, such as when punishment is collectively justified and administered. In addition, benefits may exceed costs when punishers have relatively greater physical and social capital and gain more from cooperation. We provide examples from the Tsimane horticulturalists of Bolivia to support our claims.
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  • Partner choice, fairness, and the extension of morality.Nicolas Baumard, Jean-Baptiste André & Dan Sperber - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1):102-122.
    Our discussion of the commentaries begins, at the evolutionary level, with issues raised by our account of the evolution of morality in terms of partner-choice mutualism. We then turn to the cognitive level and the characterization and workings of fairness. In a final section, we discuss the degree to which our fairness-based approach to morality extends to norms that are commonly considered moral even though they are distinct from fairness.
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  • Has punishment played a role in the evolution of cooperation? A critical review.Nicolas Baumard - 2010 - Mind and Society 9 (2):171-192.
    In the past decade, experiments on altruistic punishment have played a central role in the study of the evolution of cooperation. By showing that people are ready to incur a cost to punish cheaters and that punishment help to stabilise cooperation, these experiments have greatly contributed to the rise of group selection theory. However, despite its experimental robustness, it is not clear whether altruistic punishment really exists. Here, I review the anthropological literature and show that hunter-gatherers rarely punish cheaters. Instead, (...)
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  • Why possibly language evolved.Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd - unknown
    Human syntactic language has no close parallels in other systems of animal communication. Yet it seems to be an important part of the cultural adaptation that serves to make humans the earth’s dominant organism. Why is language restricted to humans given that communication seems to be so useful? We argue that language is part of human cooperation. We talk because others can normally trust what we say to be useful to them, not just to us. Models of gene-culture coevolution give (...)
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  • The evolution of peace.Luke Glowacki - 2024 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 47:e1.
    While some species have affiliative and even cooperative interactions between individuals of different social groups, humans are alone in having durable, positive-sum, interdependent relationships across unrelated social groups. Our capacity to have harmonious relationships that cross group boundaries is an important aspect of our species' success, allowing for the exchange of ideas, materials, and ultimately enabling cumulative cultural evolution. Knowledge about the conditions required for peaceful intergroup relationships is critical for understanding the success of our species and building a more (...)
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  • Perspectives from ethnography on weak and strong reciprocity.Polly Wiessner - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):44-45.
    To add ethnographic perspective to Guala's arguments, I suggest reasons why experimental and ethnographic evidence do not concur and highlight some difficulties in measuring whether positive and negative reciprocity are indeed costly. I suggest that institutions to reduce the costs of maintaining cooperation are not limited to complex societies.
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  • Examining punishment at different explanatory levels.Miguel dos Santos & Claus Wedekind - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):23-24.
    Experimental studies on punishment have sometimes been over-interpreted not only for the reasons Guala lists, but also because of a frequent conflation of proximate and ultimate explanatory levels that Guala's review perpetuates. Moreover, for future analyses we may need a clearer classification of different kinds of punishment.
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  • Reciprocity on Demand.Michael Schnegg - 2015 - Human Nature 26 (3):313-330.
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  • Hadza Cooperation.Frank W. Marlowe - 2009 - Human Nature 20 (4):417-430.
    Strong reciprocity is an effective way to promote cooperation. This is especially true when one not only cooperates with cooperators and defects on defectors (second-party punishment) but even punishes those who defect on others (third-party, “altruistic” punishment). Some suggest we humans have a taste for such altruistic punishment and that this was important in the evolution of human cooperation. To assess this we need to look across a wide range of cultures. As part of a cross-cultural project, I played three (...)
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  • Punishment is not a group adaptation.Nicolas Baumard - 2011 - Mind and Society 10 (1):1-26.
    Punitive behaviours are often assumed to be the result of an instinct for punishment. This instinct would have evolved to punish wrongdoers and it would be the evidence that cooperation has evolved by group selection. Here, I propose an alternative theory according to which punishment is a not an adaptation and that there was no specific selective pressure to inflict costs on wrongdoers in the ancestral environment. In this theory, cooperation evolved through partner choice for mutual advantage. In the ancestral (...)
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  • The social structure of cooperation and punishment.Herbert Gintis & Ernst Fehr - 2012 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1):28-29.
    The standard theories of cooperation in humans, which depend on repeated interaction and reputation effects among self-regarding agents, are inadequate. Strong reciprocity, a predisposition to participate in costly cooperation and the punishment, fosters cooperation where self-regarding behaviors fail. The effectiveness of socially coordinated punishment depends on individual motivations to participate, which are based on strong reciprocity motives. The relative infrequency of high-cost punishment is a result of the ubiquity of strong reciprocity, not its absence.
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  • Interpersonal Aggression among Aka Hunter-Gatherers of the Central African Republic.Nicole Hess, Courtney Helfrecht, Edward Hagen, Aaron Sell & Barry Hewlett - 2010 - Human Nature 21 (3):330-354.
    Sex differences in physical and indirect aggression have been found in many societies but, to our knowledge, have not been studied in a population of hunter-gatherers. Among Aka foragers of the Central African Republic we tested whether males physically aggressed more than females, and whether females indirectly aggressed more than males, as has been seen in other societies. We also tested predictions of an evolutionary theory of physical strength, anger, and physical aggression. We found a large male bias in physical (...)
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  • A Naturalistic Study of Norm Conformity, Punishment, and the Veneration of the Dead at Texas A&M University, USA.Michael Alvard & Katherine Daiy - 2021 - Human Nature 32 (3):652-675.
    Culturally inherited institutional norms structure much of human social life. Successfully replicating institutions train their current members to behave in the generally adaptive ways that served past members. Ancestor veneration is a well-known manifestation of this phenomenon whereby deference is conferred to prestigious past members who are used as cultural models. Such norms of respect may be maintained by punishment based on evidence from theory and laboratory experiments, but there is little observational evidence to show that punishment is commonly used. (...)
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  • Mutualism is only a part of human morality.Herbert Gintis - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (1):91-91.
    Baumard et al. mischaracterize our model of individual and social choice behavior. We model individuals who maximize preferences given their beliefs, and subject to their informational and material constraints (Fehr & Gintis 2007). Individuals thus must make trade-offs among self-regarding, other-regarding, and character virtue goals. Two genetic predispositions are particularly crucial. The first is strong reciprocity. The second is the capacity to internalize norms through the socialization process. Our model includes the authors' model as a subset.
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  • Coping with Favoritism in Recruitment and Selection: A Communal Perspective.Jasper Hotho, Dana Minbaeva, Maral Muratbekova-Touron & Larissa Rabbiosi - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 165 (4):659-679.
    We examine how recruiting managers cope with communal norms and expectations of favoritism during recruitment and selection processes. Combining insights from institutional theory and network research, we develop a communal perspective on favoritism that presents favoritism as a social expectation to be managed. We subsequently hypothesize that the communal ties between job applicants and managers affect the strategies that managers employ to cope with this expectation. We test these ideas using a factorial survey of the effects of clan ties on (...)
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  • Altruistic punishment in modern intentional communities.Hector Qirko - 2020 - Interaction Studies 21 (3):412-427.
    Evolutionists studying human cooperation disagree about how to best explain it. One view is that humans are predisposed to engage in costly cooperation and punishment of free-riders as a result of culture/gene coevolution via group selection. Alternatively, some researchers argue that context-specific cognitive mechanisms associated with traditional neo-Darwinian self- and kin-maximization models sufficiently explain all aspects of human cooperation and punishment. There has been a great deal of research testing predictions derived from both positions; still, researchers generally agree that more (...)
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  • The Role of Culture in Evolutionary Theories of Human Cooperation.Hector Qirko - 2021 - Analyse & Kritik 43 (1):169-190.
    Evolutionarily-minded scholars working on the most puzzling aspects of human cooperation-one-shot, anonymous interactions among non-kin where reputational information is not available-can be roughly divided into two camps. In the first, researchers argue for the existence of evolved capacities for genuinely altruistic human cooperation, and in their models emphasize the role of intergroup competition and selection, as well as group norms and markers of membership that reduce intragroup variability. Researchers in the second camp explain cooperation in terms of individual-level decision-making facilitated (...)
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