Regulating punishment to enforce cooperation: from individuals to institutions – ENFORCE

Punishment is a powerful mechanism for enforcing cooperation, yet it is also a double-edged sword. While some accounts emphasize its prosocial consequences, others highlight its potential for harm. Punishment can be used to seek revenge or to gain competitive advantage over others, and it is sometimes directed at highly cooperative individuals. Human groups therefore face a dual challenge: enforcing cooperation while minimizing the destructive consequences of punishment. How do individuals and communities regulate punishment in ways that serve the common good? Integrating insights from psychology, anthropology, economics, and cultural evolution, ENFORCE proposes and empirically tests three pathways that can mitigate the dark side of punishment. The project is structured around three interrelated lines of research that investigate how punishment is regulated through reputational systems, social norms, and institutional rules. It uses a multi-method approach combining cross-cultural surveys across both small-scale and industrialized societies with novel experimental tasks to study the bottom-up emergence of norms and institutions. Project 1 investigates how reputational systems can regulate punishment by rewarding prosocial punishers and imposing reputational costs on antisocial punishers. It focuses on how the reputational benefits and costs of punishment vary with its form, strength, and proportionality. Project 2 examines how social norms regulate punishment by prescribing who is entitled to punish and on whose behalf. It focuses on norms that may limit punishment by victims, their kin or allies, and investigates how these norms vary across cultures. Together, Projects 1 and 2 respond to growing calls in the social and behavioral sciences to move beyond studying Western student samples by collecting data from culturally diverse populations. This cross-cultural approach enables the identification of similarities and differences in the evaluation of punishment across societies and allows for theory-driven tests of how socio-ecological and cultural factors shape punishment norms. Project 3 investigates how formal institutions regulate punishment through rules that define when punishment is allowed, how severe it can be, and who may be targeted. To understand variation in institutional solutions across groups, this project uses decision-making experiments that simulate key features of real-world collective action problems. This innovative setup enables causal tests of how external threats—such as environmental risks or intergroup conflict—influence the design of punishment institutions. Together, these projects introduce methodological innovations by generating open cross-societal datasets and developing new experimental paradigms to study the emergence and change of institutions. Altogether, ENFORCE holds significant potential to integrate seemingly disparate findings on the many uses of punishment by uncovering the mechanisms through which societies regulate punishment to enforce cooperation.