The neural basis of altruistic punishment.

Many people voluntarily incur costs to punish violations of social norms. Evolutionary models and empirical evidence indicate that such altruistic punishment has been a decisive force in the evolution of human cooperation. We used H2 15O positron…

Both laboratory and field data suggest that people punish noncooperators even in one-shot interactions. Although such altruistic punishment may explain the high levels of cooperation in human societies, it creates an evolutionary puzzle: existing…

A central evolutionary challenge for social groups is uniting a heterogeneous set of individuals towards common goals. One means by which social groups form and endure is by endowing group members with extraordinary prosocial proclivities, such as…

Many studies show that people act cooperatively and are willing to punish free riders (i.e., people who are less cooperative than others). However, nonpunishers benefit when free riders are punished, making punishment a group-beneficial act.…

Arising from: E. Fehr & S. Gächter Nature 415, 137140 (2002)

It is still debated how altruistic punishment as one form of strong reciprocity has established during evolution and which motives may underlie such behavior. Recent neuroscientific evidence on the activation of brain reward regions during…

Fehr and Gächter reply - Fowler et al. raise an important question. They correctly argue that the desire to reduce inequality may motivate cooperators who altruistically punish free riders in our experiments. Also, the evolutionary history of humans…

Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr and Gächter present experimental evidence in humans indicating that negative emotions towards non-cooperators…

Evolutionary models for altruistic behavior typically make the assumption of homogeneity: each individual has the same costs and benefits associated with cooperating with each other and punishing for selfish behavior. In this paper, we relax this…

Mentalizing refers to our ability to read the mental states of other agents and engages many neural processes. The brain's mirror system allows us to share the emotions of others. Through perspective taking, we can infer what a person currently…