Research article summary (published 26 Sep 2009):

Costly punishment does not always increase cooperation.

Full 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.

Author information

Author/s: Wu, Jia-Jia (JJ); Zhang, Bo-Yu (BY); Zhou, Zhen-Xing (ZX); He, Qiao-Qiao (QQ); Zheng, Xiu-Deng (XD); Cressman, Ross (R); Tao, Yi (Y);

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.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2009-Oct; vol 106 (issue 41) : pp 17448-51

Dates: Created 2009/10/15; Completed 2009/11/03; Revised 2009/11/06;

PMID: 19805085, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 11/9/2009, IMS Date: )

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

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MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Altruism Attitude Behavior Therapy China Cross-Cultural Comparison Female Game Theory Humans

Interpersonal Relations Male Patient Compliance Punishment Students United States Universities Young Adult

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