Are punishment able to enhance socially beneficial cooperation? Yes, but the costs of punishment outweigh the gains from cooperation, according to recent experimental studies. So is it backfire? No, maybe just not long enough, Gächter et al. argued (1). The contrast between the results of 50-round public goods games and 10-round games showed that punishment that enhances cooperation could be beneficial in the long-run. The underlying reason is that the subjects can learn to evade the punishment gradually. Umm, clear enough, but is it the whole story of the evolution of cooperation? Probably not.
Again and again, some researchers confused the altruistic cooperation with the selfish cooperation. If the fear for punishment is the driving force of cooperation, we should not expect any charity and voluntary donation, but we did. All the economic experiments so far examined the learning process in the behavioral tier, leaving the evolutionary tier untouched. Fear for punishment may explain a trivial part of the cooperation, but the pro-sociality of human (and possibly other non-human animals) owes to the inside pro-social motivation that evolved during a long history that cannot be imitated with the experiment design used currently.
Another doubt is cast on the origin of the irrational motivation of punishment that results in the second-order "free rider" dilemma.
All in all, punishment itself is unlikely to solely enforce the pro-social cooperation.
1. Gachter, S., Renner, E. and Sefton, M., 2008. The Long-Run Benefits of Punishment. Science, 322:1510.
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