Anti-social Punishment

Excellent post!

Some scattered thoughts:

Tall poppy syndrome may be related.

In my experience, the attitude of antisocial punishers toward do-gooders is something like: “Who does he think he is? Thinks he’s so much better than the rest of us? Showing off how good he is?” (This may not be all of it, but it’s a strong component.)

This may be explained in part by two things:

1. Altruism is costly signaling for wealth. Contributing to the commons, or even not stealing (or doing other antisocial things), signals that you can afford to do so.

2. Also, there may be a common sentiment that altruism is only ever intended as signaling (of virtue, of wealth, of whatever), and is thus a status-enhancing move. In my experience, people from such societies will often not comprehend (or be very skeptical of, even when they do comprehend) the idea of acting altruistically for purely… altruistic reasons.

Author here.

In the hindsight, I still feel that the phenomenon is interesting and potentially important topic to look into. I am not aware of any attempt to replicate or dive deeper though.

As for my attempt to explain the psychology underlying the phenomenon I am not entirely happy with it. It's based only on introspection and lacks sound game-theoretic backing.

By the way, there's one interesting explanation I've read somewhere in the meantime (unfortunately, I don't remember the source):

Cooperation may incur different costs on different participants. If you are well-off, putting $100 into a common pool is not a terribly important matter. If others fail to cooperate all you can lose is $100. If you just barely getting along, putting $100 into a common pool may threaten you in a serious way. Therefore, rich will be more likely to cooperate than poor. Now, if the thing is framed in moral terms (those cooperating are "good", those not cooperating are "bad") the whole thing may feel like a scam providing the rich a way to buy moral superiority. As a poor person you may thus resort to anti-social punishment as a way to punish the scam.

It's notable that, for countries where anti-social punishment is significant, the mean contribution across rounds doesn't depend much on the level of anti-social punishment but more on the contributions in the first round; for the 7 countries with the most total anti-social punishment, their lines are all fairly flat.

Mean contribution and antisocial punishment (eyeballed from fig 2B in the report) aren't correlated within the group of 7 (R2=0.08).

Mean contribution and initial contribution (eyeballed from fig 2A) are correlated within the group at R2=0.99!

So in countries with low rule of law you are stuck in whatever position you start in. Pity poor Istanbul which wasn't really that bad at anti-social punishment but started at a low level and so were stuck there.

Imagine the experimenters had lied to each participant about what happened in round 1 to make it seem like everyone else was contributing more. Would the players stay at the high (made-up) rate of contributions for the rest of the 9 rounds?

I'm a little confused. The explanation you give would explain why people might punish pro-social punishers, but it doesn't really give insight into why they would punish cooperators. Is the argument that cooperators are likely to also be pro-social punishers? Or am I misunderstanding the structure of the game?

Curated. I like that this post was:

• engagingly written
• discussed an interesting and I think important topic (understanding when and how coordination/cooperation can happen or fail to happen, and why)
• had real data to dig into, while...
• being fairly upfront about the epistemic limits of that data and the author's current understanding.

I'd be interested in followup discussion. In particular, if ever in the future someone runs a version of this experiment that included Slovakia, it'd be neat to verify if the predictions made here are borne out.

However, introduction of punishment had no effect in some of the pools.

This doesn't seem quite right. While some of the pools didn't see their contribution rates increase when punishment was added, at least the contribution rates didn't decrease! As they did without punishment.

Robin Hanson wrote about similar experiments in 2010.

It seems that extreme generosity can be regarded as establishing an undesirable behavior standard. His post suggests a workaround, if your productivity/generosity greatly exceeds others: under-report your output and give credit to others.

I think an under-appreciated aspect is suspicion of Officially Altruistic behavior. A ton of things people do even in countries that weren't run by communists that appear to be altruistic are actually self-enriching, and in addition a ton of things people do to help the less fortunate actually end up hurting them. I would yell at a lot of people if they started ostentatiously saying they were sacrificing for my benefit when I had never asked them to, and you could easily frame that as "anti-social punishment" if you BELIEVE that they're actually helping, but from a suspicious perspective they're both probably not actually helping me and they're also helping themselves.

Nice!

I'm from Samara (that Russian city from the experiment), and I sometimes face with unappreciation of contribution. Usually altruistic people are treated like idiots (why they are taking from thier own and thier close circle to feed some commonwealth?), and sometimes with negative reaction. I tried to explain it by myself and friends with the question "why then to be a contributor?" and my view what's going on was clumsy. Thanks for that, this article is a good explanation of my native thoughts.

This is what a few generations of "don't talk to the police" will do.

I've just noticed that Dnipropetrovsk, Muscat, Minsk and Riyadh did better than Western countries in the public goods game without punishment. It may be a statistical fluke, but may it be that those societies are optimized for getting cooperative behaviour in the absence of enforcement mechanisms?

I think awareness of this effect is tremendously important. Your immune system needs to fight cancer (mindless unregulated replication) in order for you to function and pursue any goal with a lower time preference than the mindless replicators. But what's even worse than cancer is a disease that coopts the immune system, leading to a lowered ability to fight off infections in general. People who care about the future are concerned about no-value aligned replication outcompeting human values. But they should also be concerned about agentic processes that specifically undermine the ability to do low time preference work aka antisocial punishers and the things that lead them to exist and flourish.

I'm from Boston originally. Very interesting to note that Boston didn't score the highest in the non-punishment variant — it was high, but lower than Copenhagen — but scored the at the top with punishment added.

That squares with my experience of my Bostonians — reasonably friendly and pro-social but not as much so as say Scandinavia, but very much willing to get righteous if someone is defecting, probably moreso than Scandinavia.

But then, reasonably quick to forgive if someone did bad but gets with the program.

Or maybe I'm flattering my native city. But the results aren't surprise compared to my intuition. (I wish I'd made a prediction about how Boston would come out before reading the results, but alas, missed opportunity there.)

Nominating to bump this up to 2 reviews.

The insight I took from this was to beware of a scary kind of norms: not just norms those inadvertently cause equilibria, but norms which serve to maintain the equilibrium itself.

For example, requiring a publication track record in academia is intended to ensure people produce sufficiently good research output, and as a side-effect causes p-hacking and similar. However, it seems to me (though it was a while since I read it) that anti-social punishment (and relatedly, punishment of non-punishers) mostly serves to enforce the validity of the current set of norms (as opposed to some other terminal goal).

This suggests that not all norms are equally important for the stickiness of equilibria (which is an important property to keep in mind when reasoning about coordination and equilibrium-shifting), and points to some gears for predicting (and creating!) stickiness.

In communism, the State and the Party were the official sources of everything good. Private altruism meant competing with them -- an activity futile at best (because the good thing you were doing would have been equally provided by the system if you didn't interfere), and subversive at worst (because by doing it you were kinda suggesting that it actually wouldn't). If an activity is good, then "obviously" it is better for it to be provided by the powerful State guided by the wise Party, than by an unreliable petty individual.

But this alone doesn't explain the punishment by other individuals. (Why waste my resources on punishing someone for wasting their own resources?) The explanation is that if you were doing a subversive activity (an activity that could be potentially interpreted as subversive -- and yes, that is a very large range of activities), sooner or later the State would find you and punish you; and afterwards it would start looking for your accomplices. By denouncing the altruists you were signaling your loyalty to the State. The stone you threw at the person trying to improve the world might become your get-out-of-jail card when the secret police started collecting potential enemies of the regime. -- Now the regime is gone, but the habits remained.

I enjoyed this post. It brings a more world-wide view to LW (sorely missed in some things I've read here) and makes the important point that we don't all think the same. Experiences can be very different and so are our reactions and reasonings, coming with there own logic. We should not ignore the human element of how the world works.

I would suggest a bit of an edit to move the description of the game with punishment to after the non-punishment results just for ease of reading and absorption.

-- -

I also enjoyed reading the supporting material here which provided more insights into the process and participant selection. A study that stimulated a lot of thinking in me!(Would the results have been different if the groups had been grannies/hippies/etc.?)

The supporting materials contains some interesting diagrams. ( S3 and S4 )

My main comment would be that 10 rounds isn't enough to draw conclusions from. With 4 players each 'experimenting' and reacting to the previous rounds it would take a lot more for things to settle and maybe reach some sort of equilibrium.

For example the what I'm calling the "F-U-2" response (see S4) led to a drop in cooperation in many locations, but would that have worn off with more rounds and people realising co-operation was in their favour after all?

[A comment for the authors of the study - seeing the individual group results would have been interesting - the distribution of free-riders per group etc.]

An important concept, with the effect very clearly demonstrated by the study, and very helpful clarifying discussion.

I'm nominating this for the 2018 review in large part because I'd like to see an independent review of the study to check for standard reasons it would fail to replicate. I note that the author of the OP says the study authors were surprised by the result, which I think reduces my expectation of many standard forms of motivated cognition to find the particular result.

In some counties people dont take equal parts from the common pool. Moreover, in some countries, like Russia, most of people take negative part - they take nothing from the pool, but, nevertheless, get punished.

So there isn't any reason to put anything into the common pool.

Just a nitpick, from one non-native English speaker (to another ?), I have been told that the word "retard" is extremely offensive (in american English at least). I'd say up to you to decide if that was your intended effect.

Psychologically, I would be angry because, apparently, everyone else was littering but it was just me who was picked for the punished. It would be unjust. Also, there were no trash bins so I couldn't had behave even if I wanted to. That doubles the injustice. Moreover, I was carrying the cup for hours, you do-gooder moron!

Historically people had to develop a thick skin if they wanted to be pro-social because of exactly this. I think from there you get the "turn the other cheek" phrase (personified in Jesus being crucified) or the idea of an invisible being watching you doing good or bad deeds and rewarding/punishing you in the afterlife. 

The Ostblock, of course, got rid of these ideas. Not sure what's going on with the Muslim countries though (something something colonialism?)

(Confession -- I'm tired and my eyes hurt so to say I've done more than skim a few passages would be a gross overstatement)

Very tangential questions here. In these types of games does anyone use the concept of network effects in terms of understanding any of the behaviors and results?