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Science 23 June 2006:
Vol. 312. no. 5781, pp. 1767 - 1770
DOI: 10.1126/science.1127333
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Research Articles

Costly Punishment Across Human Societies

Joseph Henrich,1* Richard McElreath,2 Abigail Barr,3 Jean Ensminger,4 Clark Barrett,5 Alexander Bolyanatz,6 Juan Camilo Cardenas,7 Michael Gurven,8 Edwins Gwako,9 Natalie Henrich,1 Carolyn Lesorogol,10 Frank Marlowe,11 David Tracer,12 John Ziker13

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

1 Department of Anthropology, Emory University, 1557 Dickey Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
2 Department of Anthropology, Graduate Group in Ecology, Animal Behavior Graduate Group, Population Biology Graduate Group, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA.
3 GPRG, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, Manor Road, Oxford, OX1 3UQ, UK.
4 Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.
5 Department of Anthropology, UCLA, 341 Haines Hall, Box 951553, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
6 Department of Anthropology, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137, USA.
7 Facultad de Economia, CEDE, Universidad de Los Andes, K1 No. 18A-70, Bogotá, Colombia.
8 Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA.
9 Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Guilford College, 5800 West Friendly Avenue, Greensboro, NC 27410, USA.
10 George Warren Brown School of Social Work, Washington University, 1 Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130, USA.
11 Department of Anthropology, Harvard University, 11 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
12 Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado at Denver and Health Sciences Center, Post Office Box 173364, Campus Box 103, Denver, CO 80217, USA.
13 Department of Anthropology, Boise State University, 1910 University Drive, Boise, ID 83725, USA.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: jhenric{at}emory.edu

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