Cheater
Over the last couple of weeks,
as the Enron fiasco has played itself out like a louche fusion of Shakespeare
and the old "Dewey, Cheatum & Howe" routine, Americans have been
transfixed by the story, united in a nearly seamless sense of outrage. Regardless of
whether any laws were broken in the spectacular collapse of one of the nation's
largest companies, citizens of all political pipings have voiced disgust at
accounts of top Enron executives selling off their stock in time to enrich
themselves handsomely, while ordinary Enron employees were later forced to sit
by in impotent desperation as their retirement savings evaporated. In the
ferocity of the public outcry, and the demand from even those with no personal
stake in the Enron collapse that "justice" be done, some scientists
see a vivid example of humanity's evolved and deep-seated hatred of the Cheat.
The Cheat is the transgressor of fair play, the violator of accepted norms, the
sneak who smiles with Chiclet teeth while ladling from the community till. Human beings
are elaborately, ineluctably social creatures, scientists say, and are more
willing than any other species to work for the common good — to cooperate with
nonkin and to help out strangers, sometimes at great cost to oneself, as the
death of hundreds of rescue workers at the World Trade Center only too sadly
showed. Such a
readiness to trust others, to behave civilly in a crowd, to share and empathize,
to play the occasional Samaritan — all the behaviors that we laud and endorse
and vow to cultivate more fully in ourselves — could not have evolved without
a corresponding readiness to catch, and to punish, the Cheat. Only recently
have researchers realized that a willingness, even eagerness, to punish
transgressors of the social compact is at least as important to the maintenance
of social harmony as are regular displays of common human decency. And while the
punitive urge may seem like a lowly and unsavory impulse, scientists point out
that the effort to penalize cheaters is very often a selfless act. In an article
titled "Altruistic Punishment in Humans," which appears in the Jan. 10
issue of the journal Nature, Dr. Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and Dr.
Simon Gachter of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland offer evidence that
people will seek to punish a cheat even when the punishment is costly to them
and offers no material benefit — the very definition of altruism. The
researchers propose that the threat of such punishment may have been crucial to
the evolution of human civilization and all its concomitant achievements. "It's a
very important force for establishing large-scale cooperation," Dr. Fehr
said in a telephone interview. "Every citizen is a little policeman in a
sense. There are so many social norms that we follow almost unconsciously, and
they are enforced by the moral outrage we expect if we were to violate
them." Dr. David
Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at the State University of New York at
Binghamton, said, "People are used to thinking of social control and
moralistic aggression as forms of selfishness, and that you must be punishing
someone for your own benefit. But if you look at the sort of punishment that
promotes altruistic behavior, you see that it is itself a form of
altruism." In their new
work, Dr. Fehr and Dr. Gachter put 240 students through a series of "public
goods" experiments with real monetary stakes, always a good incentive for
cash- strapped young scholars. Each
participant was given an initial lump sum of 20 "monetary units" and
allowed to play a series of games with rotating groups of three other
participants. By the rules of the game, the members of each group independently
decided how much of their sum to contribute to a community project, which in
turn determined how much would be divvied up to participants in the end. The
more generous each contributor, the better the group did as a whole, but there
was always the risk of a participant's trying to freeload off the contributions
of others. From one
round to the next, students were kept apprised of the investment decisions by
others in their group. In some cases, there was nothing they could do about
their teammates' behavior. In other cases, though, participants were allowed to
"punish" freeloaders and skinflints after the round was through: one
monetary unit from them would cost the shirker three monetary units. Hence,
cooperators had to pay out of their own pocket to express their disgust at
another's selfish behavior. The outcome
of the study was striking on two fronts. One was the popularity of punishment
when it was permitted: 84 percent punished defectors at least once, 34.3 percent
took punitive action five times or more and almost 10 percent punished the
stingy 10 times or more. And all this, remember, involved the doling out of mad
money from people who really needed it. The second
significant result was that when the game was carried out under no-punishment
conditions, cooperation among group members quickly broke down, and participants
contributed progressively less to the public kitty as the rounds went on. But
when the opportunity to punish and be punished was applied, individual
contributions to the collective fund jumped sharply, and cooperation among group
members grew stronger rather than weaker from round to round. The
researchers also asked participants to describe their feelings toward
free-riders on a seven-point scale, from "no big deal" to "very
angry," and about 84 percent ranked themselves a five or higher. A sense of
emotional outrage is very easily evoked, said Dr. Fehr, and sometimes it feels
almost good to indulge and stoke it. Perhaps part
of the reason it feels good to rail against the sinner is that not to do so
seems irresponsible, if not cowardly. "Once you think of punishment as a
form of altruism, then the kind of person who doesn't punish emerges as a kind
of freeloader too," said Dr. Wilson, author with Dr. Elliott Sober of
"Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior." The emotional
palette behind the effectiveness of social control is a rich one, composed not
only of a sharp sense of moral indignation and a fear of being punished, but
embarrassment and shame when one violates social norms. Dr. Wilson
said that when he and his children, nonbowlers all, recently went bowling, they
were mortified when others gently scolded them for failing to observe common
bowling etiquette, like taking turns with bowlers in neighboring lanes. "My
ears were burning with shame, and we fled as soon as we could," he said. And sometimes
the severity of the emotion far outstrips that of the transgression. Dr. Fehr
cited a case during the oil crisis of the 1970's that led to long waits at gas
stations, when one motorist shot another to death for attempting to butt into
line. Some of the most odious of human behaviors, including torture, public
stonings and lynchings, may all be examples of the meting out of altruistic
punishment run amok. The drive to
punish selfish transgressors seems to be a basic human predilection.
Paradoxically, it stems from something normally associated with rosy-eyed
utopianism: according to most anthropological evidence, traditional
hunter-gatherer societies have always been highly egalitarian. In such
cultures, there are no kings or commanders, and the bounty of a good hunt or
forage is generally shared with the entire community. If one person doesn't like
or trust another, the person may walk away, or articulate that distrust with the
tip of a spear. "Hunter-gatherer
societies are scrupulously egalitarian, but not harmoniously so," said Dr.
Herbert Gintis of the University of Massachusetts, a co-author on a commentary
that appears with the current Nature research report. "They're violently
egalitarian." Despite its
antiquity, the strength and expression of the urge to scourge is clearly shaped
by culture. Anthropological studies by Dr. Fehr, Dr. Gintis and others have
shown considerable cross-cultural variation in the ardor with which people seek
to punish shifty noncooperators. As a rule, said Dr. Fehr, the more closely a
society's economy is based on market rather than kinship ties, the more
prevalent the use of altruistic punishment to bring others into line. In other
words, the more likely a person is to be negotiating with nonrelatives, and
hence the higher the chances that selfish freeloaders will seek to infiltrate
the system, the more important it becomes that everybody play by the rules. Or
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