Cooperation, punishment and prosociality

1. Cooperation, punishment and prosociality

2. outline • Cooperation and social norm following/enforcement • Models of reciprocity • Direct vs. indirect • Weak vs. strong (self- vs. other-regarding) • Norm enforcement via Punishment • Costly punishment – second vs. third (direct vs. indirect) • Roots of justice? • Prosocial mechanisms • Empathy, in-group altruism to out-group bias • Hormonal influence

3. Social norms •  establish, transmit and enforce social norms. Social norms—widely shared sentiments about what constitutes appropriate behavior—comprise a basic “grammar of social interaction”: sets of prescribed and proscribed rules that serve to foster social peace, stabilize cooperation and enhance prosperity

4. Limits of direct reciprocity • Direct reciprocity (reciprocal altruism) • cooperation in bilateral interactions, even when initially costly, is incentivized owing to the selfish benefits that may be accrued in the long-term • cooperation under direct reciprocity models is only evolutionarily stable in small groups (<10); • empirical data suggests that natural selection wouldn't favor cooperation by reciprocal altruism among unrelated individuals on the scale of human culture5. Theories of indirect reciprocity focus instead on the self-interest that is served by accruing a good reputation through altruistic behavior. 

5. Indirect reciprocity • Weak reciprocity (self-regarding) • self-interest that is served by accruing a good reputation through altruistic behavior. • potential of indirect reciprocity for explaining the emergence, among humans, of cooperation among nonrelatives. • the biological basis of morality; • major motivation for language, gossip being a way of spreading reputations(Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis) • The advent of e-commerce provides the other reason why understanding the assessment of reputations matters: the prevalence of anonymous one-shot interactions in global markets raises the issues of trust building and moral hazard

6. Simple model • attach a binary score (“Good” or “Bad”) to each individual in the population. • From time to time, two individuals meet randomly, one as donor, the other as recipient. At some cost c to one's own payoff, the donor can help the recipient, i.e., increase the recipient's payoff by a benefit b>c. • In that case, the donor's score will be Good in the eyes of all observers, whereas the score of a donor refusing to confer the benefit will be Bad. • A discriminating strategy of helping only those with a Good score would channel benefits toward those who help and discourage defectors.

7. Costly vs. noncostly punishment • A discriminator who refuses to help recipients with a Bad score receives a Bad score and risks getting no help in the next round. • In this sense, punishing defectors by withholding help is costly. Can such a trait evolve? Would it not be advantageous to distinguish justifiable defections (against a Bad recipient) from nonjustifiable defections (against a Good recipient) and attach a Bad score only to the latter? • This would constitute a noncostly form of punishment and would greatly alleviate the discriminator's task. But such a distinction requires considerable cognitive capacities. Not only the recipient's past but also that of the recipient's recipients, etc., must be taken into account. • second-order social dilemma: free-ride on others punishment

8. Limitations of indirect reciprocity • Can reputation account for widespread nature of human cooperation where one-shot (unrepeated) interactions are common and attendant reputational benefits likely to be small?

9. Strong reciprocity • ”Homo reciprocans cares about the well-being of others and about the processes determining outcomes--whether they are fair, for example, or violate a social norm. He differs in this from the self-regarding and outcome-oriented Homo economicus” -Gintis • long-term widespread cooperation is made possible by the presence of “strong reciprocators”: individuals who reward norm-followers (for example, cooperators) and punish norm-violators (for example, defectors) even when such actions are costly, and in the absence of any material future gain for the strong reciprocator • Self-regarding vs. prosocial, other-regarding preferences – altrusitic cooperation and costly punishment - search for biological prosocial processes (e.g., empathy) • capacity to learn norms; integrate predictions about norm-related action outcomes into decision making to guide their own behavior; assess other individuals' beliefs, desires and behavior in the context of these norms; and use subjective responses to norm violations to appropriately sanction defection.

10. Third party punishment • individuals will accept costs to sanction individuals who have violated fairness and distribution norms even when they were not directly affected by the norm violation • “Moralistic punishment in humans is an evolutionary mystery because it is performed by third parties. This raises the key question: Why do people care about interactions among unrelated others? Given that punishment is costly and can potentially draw retaliation, appears to be a tendency that would be selected against, raising the issue of how adaptations that give rise to moralistic punishment evolved.” –Kurzban • Alternative: moralistic punishment is reputation-enhancing (self-regarding)

11. Punishment 1-9 • John plans to be a gangster for a Halloween office party. He buys suitable clothing, as well as a small loaded gun. The gun looks like a toy, and John plans to use it to kill a rival, and then claim it was an accident. He later shoots his rival, who dies of the injuries • John has a license to hunt deer with his licensed rifle. One day, he sees a deer, takes aim, and shoots – missing the deer but killing a distant hunter. The deceased hunter had not complied with important state safety regulations. In particular, he was not wearing “hunter orange” to distinguish himself from target animals.

12. Cognitive & emotional components • cognitive processes involved in determination of responsibility • prefrontal activity was linked to a categorical aspect of legal decision-making (deciding whether or not to punish on the basis of criminal responsibility • Emotional processes involved in magnitude of punishment • amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulated cortex) consistently linked to social and emotional processing is associated with the amount of assigned punishment during legal decision-making. 

14. Prosociality: empathy • Capacity to share emotional state of others • Key motivator, proximate mechanism for altruistic behavior whereby an individual perceives and shares in the distress of another person, and acts to reduce his or her suffering • simulation theories of empathy which suggest that humans understand (i.e., ‘simulate’) others’ emotional states by imagining what they themselves would feel in a similar situation • Even the most advanced forms of empathy in humans are built on more basic forms and remain connected to core mechanisms associated with affective communication, social attachment, and parental care.  • Empathy has been shown to vary depending on interindividualdifferences (Chiao et al., 2009; Singer et al., 2004), as well as on subjective judgments of targets made by perceivers (Singer et al., 2006).

15. Caring for others draws on general mammalian neural systems of reward and social attachment. Moreover, empathy is not unique to humans, as many of the biological mechanisms are shared with other mammalian species. However, humans are special in the sense that high-level cognitive abilities, such as executive function, language, and mentalizing, implemented by the prefrontal cortex, are layered on top of phylogenetically older social and emotional capacities. These evolutionarily newer aspects of information processing expand the range of behaviors that can be driven by empathy, and expand flexibility like caring for and helping outgroup members or even individuals from different species.

16. Empathy draws on a large array of neurobiological systems that are not limited to the cortex (insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and orbitofrontal cortex), but also the midbrain (e.g., periaqueductal gray) and brainstem, and includes the autonomic nervous system (ANS), HPA axis, and endocrine systems that regulate bodily states, emotion, and reactivity. 

17. The neuroevolution of empathy Annals of the New York Academy of SciencesVolume 1231, Issue 1, pages 35-45, 8 JUN 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.xhttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06027.x/full#f2

18. Empathy for social exclusion • Does self-other overlap enhances vicarious affect sharing during empathy for social pain. We predicted that participants would show activation in the affective pain regions when observing a friend (someone with a high-degree of self-other overlap) experience social exclusion, and • MPFC activation

19. Figure 4. Brain Regions Significantly Active in the Interaction Contrast Comparing a Friend’s Exclusion > Inclusion to a Stranger’s Exclusion > Inclusion

20. Figure 3. Brain Regions during a Friend’s Exclusion Predicted by Self-Other Overlap Scores

21. Extraordinary empathy • Under certain circumstances, people display extraordinary empathy and altruism. One route to enhanced empathy and altruism is through the increased inclusion of another person in the conception of the self (Aron et al., 2004). • Care for one's social ingroup, resulting in ingrouployalty or ingroup solidarity, may be an example of extraordinary empathy that is brought about by including other group members as part of one's self concept.

22. stimulus

23. empathy • (A.) Main effect of pain [Pain > No Pain], y = 18. (B., C.) Independent regression analyses [(B.) ACC regression performed on peak voxel: 3, − 9, 45; (C.) right AI regression performed on 39, 12, 5] of [Pain > No Pain] with empathy rating as the covariate. ROIs defined by [Pain > No Pain] contrast.

24.  significantly greater activity within MPFC regions in AA relative CA participants when judging empathy for ingroup relative to outgroup targets.

25. Extraordinary empathy • empathy was associated with affective neural response with the ACC and bilateral insula, irrespective of social group membership (i.e., race). • African-Americans who experienced greater empathy for ingroup members relative to Caucasian-Americans in pain also showed greater response within the MPFC for ingroup relative to outgroup members in pain. • Additionally, across individuals, activity within the MPFC when perceiving pain expressed by ingroup relative to outgroup members predicted the degree to which people demonstrated an ingroup bias in empathy and altruistic motivation at a behavioral level. • Whereas empathy for humankind is associated with affective empathic processing, the current findings demonstrate that extraordinary empathy and altruistic motivation for members of one's own social group is associated with cognitive empathic processing.

26. Stereotypes and moral judgment

29. increased activity for sacrificing low warmth, low competence to save high warmth, high competence

30. Specifically, 88% of people say the act is unacceptable when the targets are unidentified (Hauser et al., 2007), indicating most people’s default is moral aversion to the sacrifice. We reverse this pattern by manipulating the warmth and competence of the targets involved: 84% of our respondents say it is acceptable for Joe to push a low-warmth, low-competence person off a bridge to save five high-warmth, high-competence targets. • override their moral aversion to sacrificing low-warmth, low-competence targets or whether they experience less moral aversion to override in the first place.

31. Hormonal basis of social behavio • Prosocial behavior • vasopressin (AVP)/oxytocin desire or ‘seeking’, reward, fear and aggression, affiliation and cooperation, courtship and mating, and parental care. • Social recognition • Social bonding • Assessment of the social environment • Social memory and learning • Temporal discounting • Partner choice

32. hormones POA, preoptic area; Mid, midbrain; VMH, ventromedial hypothalamus; AH, anterior hypothalamus; LS, lateral septum; eMA, extended medial amygdal

33. Hormonal influences & status goods