Costs and benefits in hunter-gatherer punishment |
| |
Authors: | Boehm Christopher |
| |
Affiliation: | Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. cboehm1@msn.com |
| |
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. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 PubMed 等数据库收录! |
|