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Article published In:
Interaction Studies
Vol. 21:3 (2020) ► pp.412–427

Altruistic punishment in modern intentional communities

| College of Charleston , USA

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 naturalistic data are needed to complement mathematical modeling and laboratory and field experiments. Most of these data have been obtained from small-scale forager and other societies, but modern intentional communities offer another productive source of information. This exploratory study describes context-specific patterns of punishment in 46 American intentional communities that cast doubt on the prediction that people are predisposed to punish free-riders in naturalistic interactions.

Keywords: cooperation, free-riding, intentional communities, punishment, self-maximization models, strong reciprocity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Strong reciprocity and self-maximization
  • 3.Study
    • 3.1Background and questions
    • 3.2Methods
    • 3.3Results
  • 4.Discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
Published online: 9 February 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.19011.qir
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