Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World

PLOS ONE, Dec 2019

Punishment offers a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies, but the maintenance of costly punishment itself remains problematic. Game theory has shown that corruption, where punishers can defect without being punished themselves, may sustain cooperation. However, in many human societies and some insect ones, high levels of cooperation coexist with low levels of corruption, and such societies show greater wellbeing than societies with high corruption. Here we show that small payments from cooperators to punishers can destabilize corrupt societies and lead to the spread of punishment without corruption (righteousness). Righteousness can prevail even in the face of persistent power inequalities. The resultant righteous societies are highly stable and have higher wellbeing than corrupt ones. This result may help to explain the persistence of costly punishing behavior, and indicates that corruption is a sub-optimal tool for maintaining cooperation in human societies.

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Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World

Citation: Duen ez-Guzman EA, Sadedin S ( Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World Edgar A. Due n ez-Guzma n 0 Suzanne Sadedin 0 Attila Szolnoki, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary 0 1 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University , Cambridge, Massachusetts , United States of America, 2 Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven , Leuven , Belgium Punishment offers a powerful mechanism for the maintenance of cooperation in human and animal societies, but the maintenance of costly punishment itself remains problematic. Game theory has shown that corruption, where punishers can defect without being punished themselves, may sustain cooperation. However, in many human societies and some insect ones, high levels of cooperation coexist with low levels of corruption, and such societies show greater wellbeing than societies with high corruption. Here we show that small payments from cooperators to punishers can destabilize corrupt societies and lead to the spread of punishment without corruption (righteousness). Righteousness can prevail even in the face of persistent power inequalities. The resultant righteous societies are highly stable and have higher wellbeing than corrupt ones. This result may help to explain the persistence of costly punishing behavior, and indicates that corruption is a sub-optimal tool for maintaining cooperation in human societies. - Funding: This work was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Collaborative Innovation Award. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The role of punishment in maintaining cooperative societies has attracted considerable attention from theorists [16], and their findings may have far-reaching implications for the social sciences. Punishment inflicting harm on individuals who fail to cooperate [5,6] is thought to facilitate cooperation within societies as diverse as those of humans [79], chimpanzees [10] and insects [11]. However, the evolutionary maintenance of punishment itself presents a problem [5]. Punishment is likely to be costly to punishers: it requires effort, and risks provoking retaliation. Therefore, punishers are likely to be removed by natural selection [5]. In human societies, where cultural evolution is prominent, individuals may also learn to avoid punishing others because of these costs [12,13]. Models suggest that costly punishment can be maintained if punishers may defect [1416], a scenario termed corruption [17]. Such corruption has been documented among social wasps [17,18] and ants [19]. Eldakar and Wilson [16] note that defectors have an incentive to punish because doing so increases the proportion of cooperators available to exploit. Allowing punishers to defect can effectively create a division of labor between punishers and cooperative non-punishers, maintaining cooperation in the society as a whole. In many realistic scenarios, there may be power inequalities between punishers and non-punishers. For example, U beda and Due nez-Guzman [20] explored the effects of allowing punishers to defect with reduced punishment. They termed this scenario the corruption game. The results showed that when power inequalities were small, defecting punishers could help to maintain a cooperative non-punishing population. The model might apply, for example, to the social wasp Dolichovespula sylvestris, where punishing behavior appears to be largely confined to defectors and queens [17]. However, in other insect societies, punishment appears to be widespread while defectors are rare, a scenario that we will call righteousness. For example, Kawabata and Tsuji [21] introduced individuals with developed ovaries to pre-existing colonies of the queenless Japanese Diacamma sp. ants. They found that such individuals were aggressively attacked by ants with inactive ovaries. Ants are thought to lack the cognitive resources for reputation systems, so the existence of righteousness in these groups presents a puzzle. U beda and Due nez-Guzman [20], found that corruption could sometimes increase the net wellbeing of the population (that is, the cumulative payoff of individuals). This occurred because defecting punishers could maintain cooperation in a non-punishing subpopulation that would otherwise defect. U beda and Due nezGuzman [20] argued that this result provides insight into human psychology, noting that corruption is widespread in many human societies and that individuals increase their moralizing (but not moral behavior) when their power increases [22]. Furthermore, the authors concluded that economic policy may use corruption to the advantage of a society, arguing that the punishment inflicted on [punishers] should always be lower than the punishment inflicted on [non-punishers] in order to maintain coopera (...truncated)


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Edgar A. Duéñez-Guzmán, Suzanne Sadedin. Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World, PLOS ONE, 2012, Volume 7, Issue 9, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0044432