Prosperity through punishment (was Re: more on procmail is not mattd's friend!)

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 12:16 PM -0800 on 1/10/02, John Young wrote:

> Idiot sigs, calls for killing and killfiling are shit for eaters.


http://www.nature.com/nsu/020107/020107-6.html

Prosperity through punishment
Retribution can breed cooperation.
10 January 2002

JOHN WHITFIELD

Notions of fairness may outweigh selfish considerations.
) Corbis

Cooperation can flourish if the public-spirited majority can punish
freeloaders, say Swiss economists. People will pay to punish - suggesting
that their notions of fairness outweigh selfish considerations. The work
may help explain why people cooperate in society.

In an investment game with shared profits, players punish those who do not
contribute to the group's good, despite the personal cost. The emotional
satisfaction of dispensing justice seems to spur them on: "People say, 'I
like to punish'," says Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich.

The fear of being fined keeps potential defectors in line, and the power to
punish gives willing cooperators a sense of security. These dynamics may
explain why early humans banded together into cooperative groups for
hunting or warfare.

Explanations of cooperation have tended to focus on what the altruist gets
out of it, either through the swapping of good turns or the benefits to
family members. "For a very long time in economics and biology there's been
an assumption of self-interest," says economist Herbert Gintis of the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Instead, he says, it seems that
egalitarianism is "a basic part of human behaviour".

<snippage...>


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