Explaining Corporal Punishment of Children: A Cross-Cultural Study

Corporal punishment of children is a frequent child-training technique in many societies in the ethnographic record. In other societies it is infrequent or rare. Using a worldwide sample of largely preindustrial societies in this article, we test previous and new theories that might explain the variation. Our multiple regression analyses indicate that frequent corporal punishment of children is predicted by higher levels of social stratification and political integration, and long-term use of an alien currency. These findings are consistent with our theory that societies are likely to practice corporal punishment to prepare children for living in a society with native or imposed (e.g., colonial) power inequality. In addition, corporal punishment appears more likely in societies in which nonrelative caretakers help raise children. And in nonpacified societies, undemocratic political decision making and a culture of violence also predict corporal punishment of children.     

Outsourcing punishment to God: beliefs in divine control reduce earthly punishment

The sanctioning of norm-transgressors is a necessary--though often costly--task for maintaining a well-functioning society. Prior to effective and reliable secular institutions for punishment, large-scale societies depended on individuals engaging in 'altruistic punishment'--bearing the costs of punishment individually, for the benefit of society. Evolutionary approaches to religion suggest that beliefs in powerful, moralizing Gods, who can distribute rewards and punishments, emerged as a way to augment earthly punishment in large societies that could not effectively monitor norm violations. In five studies, we investigate whether such beliefs in God can replace people's motivation to engage in altruistic punishment, and their support for state-sponsored punishment. Results show that, although religiosity generally predicts higher levels of punishment, the specific belief in powerful, intervening Gods reduces altruistic punishment and support for state-sponsored punishment. Moreover, these effects are specifically owing to differences in people's perceptions that humans are responsible for punishing wrongdoers.     

Parental Use of Corporal Punishment in Europe: Intersection between Public Health and Policy

Studies have linked the use of corporal punishment of children to the development of mental health disorders. Despite the recommendation of international governing bodies for a complete ban of the practice, there is little European data available on the effects of corporal punishment on mental health and the influence of laws banning corporal punishment. Using data from the School Children Mental Health Europe survey, the objective of this cross-sectional study was to examine the prevalence and legal status of corporal punishment across six European countries and to evaluate the association between parental use of corporal punishment and children’s mental health. The study found that odds of having parents who reported using occasional to frequent corporal punishment were 1.7 times higher in countries where its use is legal, controlling for socio-demographic factors. Children with parents who reported using corporal punishment had higher rates of both externalized and internalized mental health disorders.     

Broad supernatural punishment but not moralizing high gods precede the evolution of political complexity in Austronesia

Supernatural belief presents an explanatory challenge to evolutionary theorists—it is both costly and prevalent. One influential functional explanation claims that the imagined threat of supernatural punishment can suppress selfishness and enhance cooperation. Specifically, morally concerned supreme deities or ‘moralizing high gods'' have been argued to reduce free-riding in large social groups, enabling believers to build the kind of complex societies that define modern humanity. Previous cross-cultural studies claiming to support the MHG hypothesis rely on correlational analyses only and do not correct for the statistical non-independence of sampled cultures. Here we use a Bayesian phylogenetic approach with a sample of 96 Austronesian cultures to test the MHG hypothesis as well as an alternative supernatural punishment hypothesis that allows punishment by a broad range of moralizing agents. We find evidence that broad supernatural punishment drives political complexity, whereas MHGs follow political complexity. We suggest that the concept of MHGs diffused as part of a suite of traits arising from cultural exchange between complex societies. Our results show the power of phylogenetic methods to address long-standing debates about the origins and functions of religion in human society.     

The 'spiteful' origins of human cooperation

We analyse generosity, second-party ('spiteful') punishment (2PP), and third-party ('altruistic') punishment (3PP) in a cross-cultural experimental economics project. We show that smaller societies are less generous in the Dictator Game but no less prone to 2PP in the Ultimatum Game. We might assume people everywhere would be more willing to punish someone who hurt them directly (2PP) than someone who hurt an anonymous third person (3PP). While this is true of small societies, people in large societies are actually more likely to engage in 3PP than 2PP. Strong reciprocity, including generous offers and 3PP, exists mostly in large, complex societies that face numerous challenging collective action problems. We argue that 'spiteful' 2PP, motivated by the basic emotion of anger, is more universal than 3PP and sufficient to explain the origins of human cooperation.     

Persistent cooperators in nature

The evolution and maintenance of cooperation fascinated researchers for several decades. Recently, theoretical models and experimental evidence show that costly punishment may facilitate cooperation in human societies. The puzzle how the costly punishment behaviour evolves can be solved under voluntary participation. Could the punishers emerge if participation is compulsory? Is the punishment inevitably a selfish behaviour or an altruistic behaviour? The motivations behind punishment are still an enigma. Based on public goods interactions, we present a model in which just a certain portion of the public good is divided equally among all members. The other portion is distributed to contributors when paying a second cost. The contributors who are willing to pay a second cost are called the persistent cooperators (PC), indicating their desire to retrieve the proportion of the payoff derived from their own contributions with persistent efforts. We show that the persistent cooperators can be costly punishers, which may account for the origin of human costly punishment behaviour under compulsory participation. In this sense our models may show theoretically that the original motivation behind punishment is to retrieve deserved payoff from their own contributions, a selfish incentive. But the persistent cooperators can also flourish or dominate the population in other situations. We list many real examples in which contributors are the persistent cooperators, and they benefit. This indicates a simple norm promoting cooperation: contributing more and gaining more.     

An economic experiment reveals that humans prefer pool punishment to maintain the commons

Punishment can stabilize costly cooperation and ensure the success of a common project that is threatened by free-riders. Punishment mechanisms can be classified into pool punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by a paid third party, (e.g. a police system or a sheriff), and peer punishment, where the punishment act is carried out by peers. Which punishment mechanism is preferred when both are concurrently available within a society? In an economic experiment, we show that the majority of subjects choose pool punishment, despite being costly even in the absence of defectors, when second-order free-riders, cooperators that do not punish, are also punished. Pool punishers are mutually enforcing their support for the punishment organization, stably trapping each other. Our experimental results show how organized punishment could have displaced individual punishment in human societies.     

Hadza Cooperation

Strong reciprocity is an effective way to promote cooperation. This is especially true when one not only cooperates with cooperators and defects on defectors (second-party punishment) but even punishes those who defect on others (third-party, “altruistic” punishment). Some suggest we humans have a taste for such altruistic punishment and that this was important in the evolution of human cooperation. To assess this we need to look across a wide range of cultures. As part of a cross-cultural project, I played three experimental economics games with the Hadza, who are hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. The Hadza frequently engaged in second-party punishment but they rarely engaged in third-party punishment. Other small-scale societies engaged in less third-party punishment as well. I suggest third-party punishment only became more important in large, complex societies to solve more pressing collective-action problems.     

The cost of cowardice: punitive sentiments towards free riders in Turkana raids

Models indicate that large-scale cooperation can be sustained by indirect reciprocity or direct punishment, but the relative importance of these mechanisms is unresolved. Unlike direct punishment, indirect sanctions can be meted out without cost to the sanctioner, but direct punishment is advantageous when the scale of cooperation exceeds the network size of individuals. It is of great interest to assess the importance of these mechanisms in small-scale acephalous groups in which people have lived for most of our evolutionary history. Here we evaluate sentiments towards free riders in combat among the Turkana, an acephalous nomadic pastoral society in East Africa who periodically mobilize for cattle-raids against neighboring ethnic groups. Using vignette studies, we probed participants’ motivation to sanction fictitious warriors who were cowards or deserters in a raid and compared it respectively to their reactions to an unskilled warrior or a warrior who turns back due to illness. Our results indicate that the Turkana are motivated to impose both indirect and direct sanctions on cowards consistent with indirect reciprocity and punishment models of cooperation. Our findings imply that both these mechanisms have shaped human cooperative psychology, and sheds light on how prestate societies solve the collective action problem in warfare.     

Cultural values embodying universal norms: a critique of a popular assumption about cultures and human rights

In Western and non-Western societies, it is a widely held belief that the concept of human rights is, by and large, a Western cultural norm, often at odds with non-Western cultures and, therefore, not applicable in non-Western societies. The Universal Draft Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights reflects this deep-rooted and popular assumption. By using Chinese culture(s) as an illustration, this article points out the problems of this widespread misconception and stereotypical view of cultures and human rights. It highlights the often ignored positive elements in Chinese cultures that promote and embody universal human values such as human dignity and human rights. It concludes, accordingly, with concrete suggestions on how to modify the Declaration.     

Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.     

Policing and punishment across the domains of social evolution

Several decades of research in humans, other vertebrates, and social insects have offered fascinating insights into the dynamics of punishment (and its subset, policing), but authors have only rarely addressed whether there are fundamental joint principles underlying the maintenance of these behaviors. Here we present a punisher/bystander approach rooted in inclusive fitness logic to predict which individuals should take on punishing roles in animal societies. We apply our scheme to societies of eusocial Hymenoptera and nonhuman vertebrate social breeders, and we outline potential extensions for understanding conflict regulation among cells in metazoan bodies and unrelated individuals in human societies. We highlight that: 1) no social unit is expected to express punishment behavior unless it collects positive inclusive fitness benefits that surpass alternative benefits of bystanding; 2) punishment with public good benefits can be maintained through either direct fitness benefits (coercion) or indirect fitness benefits (correction) or both; 3) differences across social systems in the distributions of power, relatedness, and reproductive options drive variation in the extent to which individuals actively punish; and 4) inclusive fitness logic captures many punishment‐relevant evolutionary and ecological variables in a single framework that appears to apply across very different types of social arrangements. Synthesis Researchers have long observed that individuals in animal societies punish (and by extension, police) each other, but they have rarely investigated whether general principles underlie this behavior across social arrangements. In this paper, we present a punisher/bystander approach rooted in inclusive fitness logic to predict which individuals should take on punisher roles in animal societies. We apply the approach to eusocial insects and cooperatively breeding vertebrates and outline extensions towards the control of cancer cell lineages and punishment in human groups. We highlight how variation in specific social variables may drive differences in punishing/policing across the social domains.     

Power and corruption

Cooperation is ubiquitous in the natural world. What seems nonsensical is why natural selection favors a behavior whereby individuals would lose out by benefiting their competitor. This conundrum, for almost half a century, has puzzled scientists and remains a fundamental problem in biology, psychology, and economics. In recent years, the explanation that punishment can maintain cooperation has received much attention. Individuals who punish noncooperators thrive when punishment does not entail a cost to the punisher. However when punishment is costly, cooperation cannot be preserved. Most literature on punishment fails to consider that punishers may act corruptly by not cooperating when punishing noncooperators. No research has considered that there might be power asymmetries between punishers and nonpunishers that turn one of these type of individuals more or less susceptible to experiencing punishment. Here, we formulate a general game allowing corruption and power asymmetries between punishers and nonpunishers. We show that cooperation can persist if punishers possess power and use it to act corruptly. This result provides a new interpretation of recent data on corrupt policing in social insects and the psychology of power and hypocrisy in humans. These results suggest that corruption may play an important role in maintaining cooperation in insects and human societies. In contrast with previous research, we contend that costly punishment can be beneficial for social groups. This work allows us to identify ways in which corruption can be used to the advantage of a society.     

Hierarchy

Dominance hierarchies (sometimes called “pecking orders”) are virtually universal in social species, including humans. In most species and in ancestral and early human societies, these hierarchies allocate scarce resources, including food and often access to females. Humans sometimes use hierarchies for these allocational purposes, but humans use hierarchies for productive purposes as well—as in firms, universities, and governments. Productive hierarchies and dominance hierarchies share many features. As a result, people, including students of human behavior, often confuse types of hierarchies. For example, the Communist Manifesto attributes features to productive hierarchies that are actually characteristic of dominance hierarchies. Government hierarchies are particularly confusing, as they have many features of both types. In modern societies with socially mandated monogamy and voluntary attachment to hierarchies in the form of competitive labor markets, productive hierarchies are generally useful for all members, and it is important not to confuse the two types, either in policy or in scientific analysis.     

Evolving Righteousness in a Corrupt World

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.     

Costly punishment prevails in intergroup conflict

Understanding how societies resolve conflicts between individual and common interests remains one of the most fundamental issues across disciplines. The observation that humans readily incur costs to sanction uncooperative individuals without tangible individual benefits has attracted considerable attention as a proximate cause as to why cooperative behaviours might evolve. However, the proliferation of individually costly punishment has been difficult to explain. Several studies over the last decade employing experimental designs with isolated groups have found clear evidence that the costs of punishment often nullify the benefits of increased cooperation, rendering the strong human tendency to punish a thorny evolutionary puzzle. Here, we show that group competition enhances the effectiveness of punishment so that when groups are in direct competition, individuals belonging to a group with punishment opportunity prevail over individuals in a group without this opportunity. In addition to competitive superiority in between-group competition, punishment reduces within-group variation in success, creating circumstances that are highly favourable for the evolution of accompanying group-functional behaviours. We find that the individual willingness to engage in costly punishment increases with tightening competitive pressure between groups. Our results suggest the importance of intergroup conflict behind the emergence of costly punishment and human cooperation.     

Project Head Start—An Evaluation of the Medical Components in California

Half of 1,135 children medically examined as a part of Project Head Start in California had one or more conditions that warranted referral to a physician or dentist, and only one-fifth of these were under care. In the judgment of the examining physicians, one-third of the referable medical conditions were described as “major.” Follow-up procedures were variable and not very successful.Increased local medical society participation in planning the health services for these children is recommended as an especially important step in securing care for the problems that are identified.     

Konflikte und Konfliktlösung in den Staaten sozialer Insekten. Zwischen Superorganismus und Polizeistaat

Insect societies have traditionally been considered as harmonious, peaceful superorganisms in which all individuals altruistically cooperate to increase the reproductive success of the society as a whole. Over the last decade, this view has changed dramatically. Individual group members can pursue their egoistic interests at a cost to the whole society. The integrity of the society is sustained usually by the suppression of egoistic reproduction by workers, either through direct interference by the queen, the establishment of dominance hierarchies, or mutual policing and punishment. A detailed analysis of the processes in insect societies helps to understand which processes maintain the cooperation among egoistic individuals.     

A turning point? The Arab Spring and the Amazigh movement

This study examines the place of the Amazigh movement and communities in the evolving political fortunes of North African states. It evaluates the prospects for attaining a genuine recognition of Amazigh ethnocultural demands as part of a broader democratic transformation of society and state, and the Amazigh movement's likely contribution to that transformation. The Amazigh movement has the potential to make alliance with governments and other sectors of societies, in part to try and balance the strength of Islamist groups. However, the process is only at the beginning stages, and there is also a possibility that Amazigh self-assertion may lead to greater polarization of North African societies.