The Pros And Cons Of Strong Reciprocity

The behavior of strong reciprocity requires the ability of one individual to punish another at a cost to themselves, yet the source for allowing early humans to do this must have arisen from some powerful biological source. It has been shown that strong negative emotions may have been the basis for enabling individuals to practice strong reciprocity, giving them the willingness to confront and punish free riders in early human social groups (“Altruistic punishment” 139). In an investment scenario meant to study emotional reactions to free riders, subjects formed groups and were told to invest a certain number of redeemable points toward funding project. Every member except one invested a significant amount, after which group members were asked …show more content…
In theory, cooperation through strong reciprocity would persist since its benefits outweigh the cost of punishing others, but this behavior could only be sustained to a certain frequency (Henrich 80). In addition, the presence of second-order free riders, those individuals who cooperate in main activities but cheat when it comes to punishing non-cooperators, would cause the act of punishment to be evolutionarily unstable. Yet, this problem is solved based on how humans uniquely acquire knowledge through social learning, in which the most common/successful behavior is socially imitated by others (Henrich 80). This process allows beneficial behavior to leapfrog among individuals and removes the costs of individual learning and experimentation. In the example of punishers and cooperators, early humans would have had overall higher payoffs by cooperating than defecting, with the successful behavior of cooperation being adopted by others at a significantly higher rate. Therefore, while second-order free riders who cooperated would have had higher payoffs than punishers, defection would have become a recessive behavior and ultimately rare, making the difference in payoff between punishers and second-order free riders insignificant. At the same time, it is plausible based on statistical modeling that natural selection would have also acted on the genetic variation of early human groups, with prosocial genes being more adept to providing higher rates of cooperation and survival (Henrich 88). This process would have had influences on all aspects of strong reciprocity, including the development of strong negative emotions, brain structures/neural pathways, and overall human behavior.