Extensive cooperation among unrelated individuals is unique to humans, who often sacrifice
personal benefits for the common good and work together to achieve what they are unable …

Humans are outstanding in their ability to cooperate with unrelated individuals, and
punishment–paying a cost to harm others–is thought to be a key supporting mechanism …

Fines, corporal punishments, and other procedures of punitive justice recur across small-
scale societies. Although they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we here propose …

Economic experiments have shown that punishment can increase public goods game
contributions over time. However, the effectiveness of punishment is challenged by second …

Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to
observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that …

Institutions allow cooperation to persist when reciprocity and reputation provide insufficient
incentives. Yet how they do so remains unclear, especially given that institutions are …

Many social scientists believe humans possess an evolved motivation to punish violations of
norms—including norm violations that do not harm them directly. However, most empirical …

Reputation is a powerful driver of human behavior. Reputation systems incentivize'actors' to
take reputation-enhancing actions, and'evaluators' to reward actors with positive reputations …

Cooperative behavior is essential for conflicts between collective and individual benefits,
and evolutionary game theory provides a key framework to solve this problem. Decision …

Gossip is often invoked as playing a fundamental role for creating, sustaining, or destroy ing
cooperation. The reason seems straightforward: gossip can make or break someone's …