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Good People / Moral Enhancement
Published in Jonathan Anomaly, Creating Future People, 2020
Bowles and Gintis coined the term ‘strong reciprocity’ to describe a suite of traits exhibited by people in repeated Public Goods games – and in real life. Strong reciprocity is morally richer than conditional cooperation, which they call ‘weak reciprocity’. Instead of cooperating only when others cooperate, and in direct proportion to the degree to which others cooperate, strong reciprocators initiate cooperation, are eager to ramp up cooperation, and are willing to punish non-cooperators, even at a personal cost. Bowles and Gintis (2013) argue that most people in situations in which there are joint gains from cooperation prefer that everyone in a group play a ‘fair’ strategy, and that this preference was selected through gene–culture co-evolution. In other words, most of us have evolved to be ‘strong reciprocators’.
Acute psychosocial stress increases third-party helping but not punishing behavior
Published in Stress, 2021
Zhen Zhen, Huagen Wang, Ruida Zhu, Shen Zhang, Tao Jin, Shaozheng Qin, Chao Liu
Among these inconsistencies, the elusory results of the stress effects on costly punishment behavior in the ultimatum game (UG) drew our attention. It was found that costly punishment has not to be impacted immediately after acute stress (Vinkers et al., 2013; von Dawans et al., 2012), or be reduced as the less rejection of even unfair offers (Steinbeis et al., 2015; only for women: Youssef et al., 2018). In the UG, when faced with a decision on allocating a sum of money proposed by a partner, participants as the responder, can either accept the offer (e.g. 90:10) so that both receive the money as suggested, or reject unfair offers so that both receive nothing (i.e. 0:0) (Güth et al., 1982). Rejection of the unfair offer (i.e. perishing together unless the allotment is fair) is defined as costly/altruistic punishment (Fehr & Gächter, 2002; Henrich et al., 2006) or as strong reciprocity (Fehr et al., 2002; Gintis, 2000) for its essential role in enforcing social norms (i.e. fairness) and boosting cooperation. This altruistic punishment is believed to be driven by negative emotions (e.g. aversion, outrage) induced by unfairness (i.e. inequality aversion) (Fehr & Schmidt, 1999; Sanfey et al., 2003). However, as a self-defense behavior, this second-party punishment might be interacted with the affected direct self-interest (Civai et al., 2012) and urges for revenge (Strobel et al., 2011), which would not be a pure prosocial behavior.