– by Diego Guevara Beltrán, Jessica Ayers, Lee Cronk, & Athena Aktipis

Thirty-four experts on cooperation walk into a bar and begin to discuss the ‘true’ meaning of the term ‘reciprocity.’ A biologist offers one definition. She says, “we observe reciprocity when the gift of some food, or another favor, increases the probability for the donor to receive the same thing, or something else, from the receiver”.

Perhaps because that approximates one of Robert Trivers’ definitions of reciprocal altruism, all experts nod in agreement with the biologist. However, not being quite content with this definition, an economist retorts “[that the] formulation is rather sloppy.” His colleague adds that “reciprocity should be conceptualized as reciprocal strategies in repeated games, normative obligations, and individual preferences to respond to kind acts with kind acts and to unkind acts with unkind acts.”

“Yes, yes, but how do we operationalize reciprocity?” asks one psychologist. He says, “The best statistical definition is the contemporaneous correlation of two individuals’ responses within time-series regression analyses and as partner effects among these variables.” Intrigued but bewildered, another psychologist adds “reciprocity is reciprocity, that’s what I was taught! Because he gave to him and he gave to me, then I gave to her, albeit indirectly. But I couldn’t keep track of who gave what to whom, what I owed to him, or who I should groom. Maybe we should just avoid this definitional animosity and just call all transfers something-something reciprocity!”

A review of the literature yields a proliferation of reciprocity-related terms – thirty-four at last count. That might lead you to believe that experts indeed agreed with the bewildered psychologist. Perhaps experts want to avoid definitional animosity and decided to call all transfers “something-something” reciprocity. With several conflicting, overlapping, and even a few redundant terms, it was clear there is no consensus among scholars regarding what truly constitutes reciprocity. In fact, these terms continue to proliferate, as evidenced by the preceding paper in the same issue of Evolution and Human Behavior (i.e., “dynamic indirect reciprocity”). This lack of consensus and the continued proliferation of terms motivated us to review the term reciprocity and survey cooperation experts about it.

In our study, we asked 85 cooperation experts to rate the extent to which they believe thirty scholarly definitions of the term reciprocity were truly reciprocity. Some of these definitions (e.g., indirect reciprocity: return is expected from someone other than recipient of benefit) are common in the literature, while others (e.g., homeomorphic reciprocity: exchange of things that are the same) not so much.

We first wanted to know whether experts’ responses would help us identify underlying dimensions of reciprocity (i.e., characteristics that cluster some, but not other, terms together). Applying factor analyses, we find that the scholarly definitions of the term reciprocity can be represented by four broad dimensions: (1) Balanced Transfers (i.e., transfers that are of equal or equivalent value), (2) Reputation-based Transfers (i.e., transfers where individuals give to others who have given in the past and receive from others if they have given in the past, (3) Debt-based Transfers (i.e., transfers where individuals keep track of, and expect repayment for, what they give to others), and (4) Unconditional Transfers (i.e., transfers that do not revolve around concepts of debt or account keeping). This four-factor framework captures greater variation in types, or dimensions, of transfers than previous frameworks (e.g., direct, indirect, and generalized reciprocity).

We encourage experts to consider adopting these terms. In doing so, we can provide specific qualifiers to a transfer while at the same time reducing the possible number of dimensions that describe a transfer based on whether, or the extent to which, they are balanced, debt-based, reputation-based, or unconditional. For example, we saw that several experts used the same term (e.g., indirect reciprocity) to describe multiple different reciprocity terms. Hence, our framework would allow experts to avoid using overlapping terms to describe different dimensions of transfers, ultimately improving communication within and between disciplines.

We then assessed the level of consensus among experts regarding what truly constitutes reciprocity. There was no consensus regarding what should be considered reciprocity. However, over 90% of experts agreed that unconditional transfers (e.g., generalized reciprocity I: non-conditional sharing and giving of assistance) should not be considered reciprocity. So, although experts do not yet agree on what truly constitutes reciprocity, these findings suggest that the scholarly community can move beyond discussions of whether unconditional transfers should or should not be considered reciprocity. They should not be.

Instead, the scholarly community might consider focusing on outstanding disagreements, such as those identified in our study. For example, some experts believe that transfers are reciprocity only if agents have the intention to reward a giver or incentivize a receiver to give back, while others do not think intentionality is a defining feature of reciprocity. Similarly, some experts believe that reciprocity must involve a cost, while others believe that reciprocity does not involve cost or transfers with negative utility.

Focusing on these issues might help experts reach a consensus regarding what truly constitutes reciprocity. However, we might also supersede these disagreements by adopting the language of Balanced, Debt-based, Reputation-based, and Unconditional transfers. Does it matter for the study of evolution and human behavior whether unconditional giving is or is not reciprocity? We think not. What matters is that we reach a deeper understanding of the ultimate causes and proximate mechanisms underlying the diversity of transfers that have shaped the evolution of human behavior. While our framework does not include information about the ultimate causes of behavior, it provides information about the proximate mechanisms underlying an individual’s decision to engage in a transfer. Overall, we hope our study allows the scientific community to gauge the current level of consensus, or lack thereof, regarding the term reciprocity, and ease communication across academic fields.

Read the original article: Guevara Beltrán, D., Ayers, J.D., Munoz, A., Cronk, L., & Aktipis, A. (2023). What is reciprocity? A review and expert-based classification of cooperative transfers. Evolution & Human Behavior, 44(4), 384-393.

– by Léo Fitouchi (Image credit Frans Huby, Creative Commons 3.0)

Humans want wrongdoers to suffer. From the justice courts of modern societies to the biblical “eye for an eye,” people everywhere have rules for punishing transgressions including theft, murder, assault, or property damage. Why do human societies punish wrongdoers? You might think the answer is simple: to teach offenders a lesson so that they don’t offend again and the group can function well.

This intuition—that punishment serves to enforce collective norms—reflects in many strands of social science. Émile Durkheim, the French founder of sociology, argued that punishment serves to reaffirm the sacred values of the group, thereby reinforcing group solidarity. More recently, evolutionary social scientists assume that humans feel the need to punish norm-violators even when their behavior doesn’t harm the punisher directly—a behavior called third-party punishment. We humans would be normative animals, deeply committed to getting deviants back in line, for the good of the group and at a cost to oneself.

In this view, third-party punishment is not only a universal feature of human psychology; it also explains why humans are so cooperative compared to other species. By imposing costs on antisocial actors, third-party punishment would have selected for higher levels of cooperation during human evolution.

Despite these wide-ranging claims, however, few recent studies have examined how punishment operates in the social contexts where our punitive psychology is assumed to have evolved—namely, small-scale, politically decentralized societies (for notable exceptions, see here, here, and here). Most studies of punishment rely on participants from large-scale societies or, if they include participants from small-scale societies, on artificial experiments such as economic games.

In a recent paper, Manvir Singh and I examine the concrete enactment of punishment in three small-scale societies: Kiowa bison hunters (North America), Mentawai horticulturalists (Indonesia), and Nuer pastoralists (South Sudan). We code ethnographic reports of 91 offenses among the Kiowa, analyze first-hand interviews about 276 offenses among the Mentawai, and review punitive procedures documented among the Nuer.

With find that punitive procedures are often inconsistent with a norm-enforcement function. Most notably, people don’t bother punishing violations that don’t harm them directly. The quasi-totality of the punishments we observe, whether they involve fines, killing the offender, or destroying their property, are administered by the victim themselves or their family in retaliation for the harm suffered. Contrary to the idea that third-party punishment is universal and has shaped the evolution of human cooperation, people often seem indifferent to transgressions that do not affect them directly, even for serious transgressions such as murder.

If people do not punish to enforce collective norms or group cooperation, then what is punishment for? A useful analogy here is the distinction, made in some large-scale societies, between criminal law and civil law. Criminal law deals with violations of the society’s norms, which are punished by third-party officials on behalf of society as a whole. Civil law, by contrast, deals with dyadic disputes between private parties, requiring the offender to compensate the victim for the tort inflicted. Punitive justice in small-scale societies, we argue, serves only the civil function of resolving private disputes between offender and victim and restoring their cooperative relationship that was broken by the offense.

Offenses such as theft, murder, or adultery typically trigger retaliation on the part of the victim—a behavior evolved to deter future exploitation. Yet unrestrained retaliation can trigger counter-punishment on the part on of offender, which risks escalating into destructive feuds that end up harming not only disputants themselves, but also their kin or allies, who often get embroiled in the conflict. People have thus had a mutual interest in designing and retaining punitive procedures that seemed well-suited to reconciling disputants and limiting conflict between offender and victim after offenses.

Our results show that the justice systems of the Kiowa, the Mentawai, and the Nuer exhibit many features consistent with this restorative function. First, punishment was entangled with compensation: the offender had to pay costs, yes, but often while providing the victim with material benefits such as pigs, cattle, horses, or other valuables. This allows the victim to experience forgiveness and appeases their urge for revenge, preventing harsh retaliations that could spark destructive feuds. Second, the prescribed level of punishment and compensation was proportionate to the tort inflicted on the victim. This, again, is well suited to satisfy the victim’s urge for revenge while avoiding disproportionate retaliation that could spark counter-revenge. Third, while third parties rarely punished, they often intervened to mediate, pacify disputants, and help them achieve peaceful resolution.

Our results echo longstanding observations of legal anthropologists. For decades, researchers working in small-scale, politically decentralized societies have insisted on the rarity of third-party punishment, the private nature of law, and the compensatory logic of justice. Yet these features of punishment have been largely ignored by evolutionary social scientists and psychologists, leading to misleading assumptions about the evolution of punishment and cooperation. Rather than third-party punishers enforcing cooperation, as often occurs in large-scale, anonymous societies, social order in most human societies may have been far more decentralized, emerging from individuals and families negotiating over how to best treat each other.

Read the original paper: Fitouchi, L., & Singh, M. (2023). Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies. Evolution & Human Behavior, 44(5), 502-514.