Our recent paper on the evolution of third-party punishment behavior was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Here is a link to the full paper.
It subsequently attracted considerable media coverage, including Why Some Communities Police Themselves, While Others Don’t at Bloomberg News, Evolution of ‘third party punishment’ at Science Daily, and Crime and punishment: interdisciplinary researchers explain ‘third party’ evolution from the Maryland Institute for Systems Research.
The work was also covered through a University of Maryland press release and The Atlantic Cities. To quote the UMD release, the paper investigates the following question through an evolutionary game-theoretic lens:
Unlike police and courts that mete out official punishments, third-party punishment is informal, based on an individual’s decision to right a perceived wrong. In some cultures, third-party punishment, when used responsibly, is a useful tool to enforce social norms. Why does it evolve in some places but not others?
Game theory has been used before in social science work, but this is the first time that cross-cultural psychologists and computational game theorists have collaborated to examine the evolution of third-party punishment.
This research was done in collaboration with my PhD advisors Dana Nau from UMD’s Department of Computer Science, and Michele Gelfand from UMD’s Department of Psychology.
I previously had a video animation here showing a small example of the evolutionary game model, where nodes represented different individuals with different strategies and illustrated how Responsible Punishers can take over a population under social network conditions of high “strength of ties.” I’ve lost the original video for now, but I’ll try to get it back up when I find it.
Below are screenshots from some of the press coverage:
