Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Anti-social Punishment , published by Martin Sustrik on the LessWrong.
This is a cross post from 250bpm.com.
Introduction
There's a trope among Slovak intellectual elite depicting an average Slovak as living in a village, sitting a local pub, drinking Borovička, criticizing everyone and everything but not willing to lift a finger to improve things. Moreover, it is assumed that if you actually tried to make things better, said individual would throw dirt at you and place obstacles in your way.
I always assumed that this caricature was silly. It was partly because I have a soft spot for Slovak rural life but mainly because such behavior makes absolutely no sense from game-theoretical point of view. If a do-gooder is stupid enough to try to altruistically improve your life, why go into trouble of actively opposing them? Why not just sit safely hidden in the pub, drink some more Borovička and wait until they are done?
Well, it turns out that the things are far more complex then I thought.
Public goods game
Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni and Simon Gächter did a study of how people from different societies deal with cooperation and punishment. You can find the paper here and supporting material here.
The study is based on the "public goods" game. The game works as follows:
There are four players. Each player gets 20 tokens to start with. Every participant either keeps them or passes some of them into a common pool. After all the players are done with their moves, each of them, irrespective of how much they contributed, gets tokens equal to 40% of all the tokens in the common pool. The participants cannot communicate with each other and are unaware of each other's identities. The game is repeated, with the same players, 10 times in a row.
The earnings, obviously, depend not only on subject's move but also on the willingness of the other players to cooperate and put tokens into the common pool. But free riders get an advantage. They keep their original tokens but also get their share from the pool.
To get a feeling of the payoffs, let's have a look at the single-round earnings in the extreme case where each participant either puts all their tokens into the pool ("cooperator") or keeps all the tokens for themselves ("free-rider"):
Public goods game with punishment
There's a variant of the "public goods game" where players are able to punish each other after each round of the game. The mechanism is simple. When the round ends the participants are informed about how much each of them has put into the common pool. Then they decide whether to spend some of their tokens to administer punishment. For each token spent on punishment you can subtract 3 tokens from the earnings of an opponent. The players know that they've been punished but they are not informed about who exactly has punished them.
Participant pools
The researchers were interested in comparing the results of the game among different societies:
Our research strategy was to conduct the experiments with comparable social groups from complex developed societies with the widest possible range of cultural and economic backgrounds to maximize chances of observing cross-societal differences in punishment and cooperation. The societies represented in our participant pools diverge strongly according to several widely used criteria developed by social scientists in order to characterize societies. This variation, covering a large range of the worldwide available values of the respective criteria, provides us with a novel test for seeing whether societal differences between complex societies have any impact on experimentally observable disparities in cooperation and punishment behavior. ... To minimize sociodemographic variability, we conducted all experiments with university undergraduates who were similar in age, shared an (...
view more