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Costs and benefits in hunter-gatherer punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2012

Christopher Boehm
Christopher Boehm
Affiliation:
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089. cboehm1@msn.com
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Abstract

Hunter-gatherer punishment involves costs and benefits to individuals and groups, but the costs do not necessarily fit with the assumptions made in models that consider punishment to be altruistic – which brings in the free-rider problem and the problem of second-order free-riders. In this commentary, I present foragers' capital punishment patterns ethnographically, in the interest of establishing whether such punishment is likely to be costly; and I suggest that in many cases abstentions from punishment that might be taken as defections by free-riders are actually caused by social-structural considerations rather than being an effect of free-rider genes. This presentation of data supplements the ethnographic analysis provided by Guala.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2012 , pp. 19 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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