Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans - PubMed (original) (raw)

Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans

Delia Baldassarri et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2011.

Abstract

Social sanctioning is widely considered a successful strategy to promote cooperation among humans. In situations in which individual and collective interests are at odds, incentives to free-ride induce individuals to refrain from contributing to public goods provision. Experimental evidence from public goods games shows that when endowed with sanctioning powers, conditional cooperators can discipline defectors, thus leading to greater levels of cooperation. However, extant evidence is based on peer punishment institutions, whereas in complex societies, systems of control are often centralized: for instance, we do not sanction our neighbors for driving too fast, the police do. Here we show the effect of centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority on cooperation. We designed an adaptation of the public goods game in which sanctioning power is given to a single monitor, and we experimentally manipulated the process by which the monitor is chosen. To increase the external validity of the study, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 1,543 Ugandan farmers from 50 producer cooperatives. This research provides evidence of the effectiveness of centralized sanctioning and demonstrates the causal effect of legitimacy on cooperation: participants are more responsive to the authority of an elected monitor than a randomly chosen monitor. Our essay contributes to the literature on the evolution of cooperation by introducing the idea of role differentiation. In complex societies, cooperative behavior is not only sustained by mechanisms of selection and reciprocity among peers, but also by the legitimacy that certain actors derive from their position in the social hierarchy.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.

Average contribution to the public good in the baseline (black), random monitor (blue), and elected monitor (red) conditions. For rounds 3 and 6 we report the percentage increase in contributions comparing the random and baseline conditions, and elected with random [e.g., in round 3, subjects in the random monitor contributed 16.6% more (P = 0.000) than in the baseline condition, and subjects in the elected monitor contributed 8.8% more than in the random monitor condition]. n = 1,446 (1,543 players − 97 monitors).

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2.

The marginal effect of an elected monitor on contributions is twice as big as that of the random monitor, both with respect to players’ expectations and reaction to punishment. Plot of the estimated change in contributions (A) for all players from second preliminary round to round 3; (B) for sanctioned player in rounds 3–6; and (C) for sanctioned players in rounds 3–6 distinguishing between monitors with a dominant or nondominant profile. Parameter estimates come from multilevel models in which we control for individual and group-level predictors (

SI Appendix, Tables S2 and S3

). All continuous variables are held constant at mean values, and the categorical variables are set to male and born local.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 3.

When facing similar distributions of contributions, elected and random monitors have similar sanctioning behavior. The plots present a comparison of the sanctioning behavior of matched pairs of monitors. We used a Kullback–Leibler divergence measure to match the distribution of contributions that an elected monitor faced with the closest distribution faced by a random monitor. Plot of the (A) number of players sanctioned and (B) maximum contribution sanctioned per round. Vertical bars indicate ±SD. P values from Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test are all greater than conventional levels of significance.

Similar articles

Cited by

References

    1. Olson M. The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press; 1965.
    1. Fehr E, Gächter S. Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature. 2002;415:137–140. - PubMed
    1. Sigmund K. Punish or perish? Retaliation and collaboration among humans. Trends Ecol Evol. 2007;22:593–600. - PubMed
    1. Henrich J, et al. Costly punishment across human societies. Science. 2006;312:1767–1770. - PubMed
    1. Rockenbach B, Milinski M. The efficient interaction of indirect reciprocity and costly punishment. Nature. 2006;444:718–723. - PubMed

Publication types

MeSH terms

LinkOut - more resources