Investigating how cooperation is encouraged in human groups, two psychology professors found that rewarding of cooperators, and of those who rewarded them, played a greater role than did punishment of noncooperators and of the people who refused to punish them. As a result, rewarders came out of the study game with more money.
Toko Kiyonari and Pat Barclay of McMaster Univ. in Canada set up a series of studies in which undergraduate students in groups of four were given a choice: keep $5 Canadian, or donate it to the group. The researchers said they would double the donated total and split it among the members. Each player would have to decide whether to take the sure money or gamble that enough would be donated to bring a bigger payoff. They were seated at computers in cubicles too high to see over, given code names in secret, and not allowed to communicate directly.
In each study, after that first round of decisions, subjects were told via computer who donated and who didn't (by code name). In the second round, they then were given three more dollars they could keep. For the initial study, some players were told they could also spend the money to reward the others, with each donation tripled by the researcher. The remaining players were told they could give money to have three times that amount removed from one or more of their group members as a punishment. In the first study's third round, they were told how much each code name had supposedly given as punishments or rewards, but those figures were faked to place each name into one of three categories:
At that point, some could again punish and the others could reward as in the second round. Finally, all players were surveyed to find out how much they liked the other people.
Of those who cooperated in the first round and were allowed to punish in the second, 61% did. So did 24% of the defectors. When allowed to reward, 89% of defectors and 84% of cooperators did. But people did not tend, in the third round, to punish people who had not punished in the second round. The surveys showed that the majority didn't like people who punished in the second round. This runs counter to the saying of "you're either with us or against us" quoted in the study article, and examples from history such as early 20th-Century white U.S. Southerners who were attacked for not helping to lynch African-Americans.
In contrast, second-round rewarders were themselves rewarded "such that the rewarders actually received more money from group members than the nonrewarders did," the researchers write.
Second and third studies used similar methods, but varied what the subjects were told about the actions of the others and what actions they themselves could take. These had similar results as Study 1 in that people did not punish in the later rounds those who chose not to punish in the earlier rounds, while rewarding those who rewarded in each round. Again, people who punished were not viewed as well as those who didn't. In short, cooperation was rewarded, and rewarding of cooperators was rewarded, but punishment was not. "They did not regard punishment—even punishment for failing to provide a public good—as a socially desirable act," Kiyonari and Barclay write. Reward is the basis of cooperation, not punishment, the authors suggest.
Why, then, do people still punish? This study can't answer the question, but the authors speculate it may be because justified punishers earn trust even if they aren't liked. Plus there is what could be called the "bully explanation." The authors say that by showing you get angry and are willing to punish people even if it hurts you in the long run, "punishers demonstrate that it is not in others' best interests to defect on the punisher." The scientists point out, however, that this is irrational behavior.
Source: Kiyonari, T., and P. Barclay (2008), "Cooperation in Social Dilemmas: Free Riding May Be Thwarted by Second-Order Reward Rather Than by Punishment," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 95(4):826.
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