Guala performs an invaluable service in clarifying the absence of convincing empirical evidence for strong reciprocity as a likely mechanism in the evolution and maintenance of modern human sociality. As his survey shows, humans in small groups without government generally defend their institutions and cooperative norms against free-riding by the use of very low-cost sanctions that are applied collectively. This implies that Occam's razor should be wielded against the proposals of some theorists that hominid evolution involved an evolutionary discontinuity that produced emotional satisfaction from moralistic punishment sufficient in motivational strength to subvert Hamilton's rule. However, there is another side to the picture that Guala does not address, and which could yet motivate supporters of evolutionary discontinuity hypotheses. The effectiveness of low-cost social punishment among humans should lead us to ask whether they are unusually vulnerable to such sanctions, and, if so, whether a genetic change after the divergence of hominids from the main ape branch might have directly promoted such vulnerability.
As Guala reports, ethnographic evidence suggests that the crucial condition for the effectiveness of socially distributed low-cost punishment is the high aversiveness of emotions associated with shame and social guilt. Creative literature and reflective memoirs from all literate societies abound with accounts of characters driven to extreme behavior, especially suicide and homicide, by psychic discomfort associated with experienced shame. The psychiatric clinical literature supports these culturally familiar interpretations (Lewis Reference Lewis1995). For an organism susceptible to such severe emotional pain from the knowledge that, in the judgment of fellow community members, he or she has diverged from prevailing normative expectations, it is rational to take great care to minimize the probability of being an object of negative gossip. Recognition of this point leads naturally to the following hypothesis: Perhaps the crucial device for controlling free-riding in humans is an evolved disposition to suffer severely from awareness that one is widely perceived as normatively deviant. To the extent that this hypothesis is deemed worthy of scientific attention, we will then be led to wonder whether the disposition in question is a direct product of genetic selection and, if so, whether it is specific to humans.
The question of the generality of shame responses in social animals is so far neglected. De Waal (Reference de Waal1996) interprets some behavior of subordinate monkeys after indulging in copulations that would be punished by dominants if they were present, as indicating precursors of shame and/or social guilt. However, a recent extensive survey of cognitive structures and mechanisms that support coordination and cooperation in intelligent social animals (Emery et al. Reference Emery, Clayton and Frith2007) contains no index entries for these emotions. Searches of standard citation indexes turn up little or no rigorous empirical work. Two main factors may explain this neglect. First, shame is not generally regarded by emotion researchers following Panksepp (Reference Panksepp1998) as being among the basic emotions expressed in mammals generally. This comports with a tendency among emotion researchers to presume that shame requires cognitively complex reflexive representation; but a valid basis for this presumption is elusive, since there is no reason why an animal might not experience the emotion based on cues in conspecific behavior. Second, shame in humans is reasonably assumed to be a proximate indicator of fear of loss of social status, so in modeling may be assimilated under this more general kind of cost. However, this side-steps the question of whether the emotional aversiveness of shame implies additional costs to normative violations, over and above those associated with expected status losses themselves. When we wonder whether human shame makes people uniquely vulnerable to low-cost social punishment, this is the question of importance.
As argued in Ross (Reference Ross2007), and less directly in Dunbar (Reference Dunbar1996/1998), possession of language, rather than a specially evolved emotional response disposition, may be the key human distinction here. A nonhuman animal's violation of a social norm is likely to be known about and remembered only by actual witnesses. By contrast, news of a person's transgressions can be spread widely through linguistic gossip and stored in the cultural memory of the whole community, thereby multiplying costs to the transgressor. Language also facilitates normative institutions of collective forgiveness: A person's violations can be almost costlessly punished, but then the punishment can also almost costlessly be erased if word is passed around that gestures or actions of restitution have been made. This is socially efficient for collective punishers in an indirect way that amplifies the low direct cost of the punishment action to its administrators. Suppose that only high-cost punishment, such as physical violence, were available. In a society based on specialization of labor, the resulting incapacitation of the transgressor is a collective cost to the community's productivity. A similar point applies to ostracism. Forgiveness conventions that can be encoded linguistically allow effects of punishment on a norm violator's productivity to be cancelled after punishment has been observed to be effective, so the violator's contribution to the social product can potentially be fully restored.
The capacity for language likely did involve a special evolutionary adaptation in the neural structures of early hominids (Deacon Reference Deacon1997). But this may have been sufficient for the establishment of substantially enhanced effectiveness of low-cost punishment to defend communities against free-riding, if emotional discomfort at detecting signs of reduced social status were already in place. Given evidence to date, it seems that postulating any additional special adaptation is gratuitous. Evidently, however, this speculation resting mainly on the point that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence should be investigated by searching experimentally for emotional distress in response to conspecific-observed norm violations in intelligent non-human social animals.
Guala performs an invaluable service in clarifying the absence of convincing empirical evidence for strong reciprocity as a likely mechanism in the evolution and maintenance of modern human sociality. As his survey shows, humans in small groups without government generally defend their institutions and cooperative norms against free-riding by the use of very low-cost sanctions that are applied collectively. This implies that Occam's razor should be wielded against the proposals of some theorists that hominid evolution involved an evolutionary discontinuity that produced emotional satisfaction from moralistic punishment sufficient in motivational strength to subvert Hamilton's rule. However, there is another side to the picture that Guala does not address, and which could yet motivate supporters of evolutionary discontinuity hypotheses. The effectiveness of low-cost social punishment among humans should lead us to ask whether they are unusually vulnerable to such sanctions, and, if so, whether a genetic change after the divergence of hominids from the main ape branch might have directly promoted such vulnerability.
As Guala reports, ethnographic evidence suggests that the crucial condition for the effectiveness of socially distributed low-cost punishment is the high aversiveness of emotions associated with shame and social guilt. Creative literature and reflective memoirs from all literate societies abound with accounts of characters driven to extreme behavior, especially suicide and homicide, by psychic discomfort associated with experienced shame. The psychiatric clinical literature supports these culturally familiar interpretations (Lewis Reference Lewis1995). For an organism susceptible to such severe emotional pain from the knowledge that, in the judgment of fellow community members, he or she has diverged from prevailing normative expectations, it is rational to take great care to minimize the probability of being an object of negative gossip. Recognition of this point leads naturally to the following hypothesis: Perhaps the crucial device for controlling free-riding in humans is an evolved disposition to suffer severely from awareness that one is widely perceived as normatively deviant. To the extent that this hypothesis is deemed worthy of scientific attention, we will then be led to wonder whether the disposition in question is a direct product of genetic selection and, if so, whether it is specific to humans.
The question of the generality of shame responses in social animals is so far neglected. De Waal (Reference de Waal1996) interprets some behavior of subordinate monkeys after indulging in copulations that would be punished by dominants if they were present, as indicating precursors of shame and/or social guilt. However, a recent extensive survey of cognitive structures and mechanisms that support coordination and cooperation in intelligent social animals (Emery et al. Reference Emery, Clayton and Frith2007) contains no index entries for these emotions. Searches of standard citation indexes turn up little or no rigorous empirical work. Two main factors may explain this neglect. First, shame is not generally regarded by emotion researchers following Panksepp (Reference Panksepp1998) as being among the basic emotions expressed in mammals generally. This comports with a tendency among emotion researchers to presume that shame requires cognitively complex reflexive representation; but a valid basis for this presumption is elusive, since there is no reason why an animal might not experience the emotion based on cues in conspecific behavior. Second, shame in humans is reasonably assumed to be a proximate indicator of fear of loss of social status, so in modeling may be assimilated under this more general kind of cost. However, this side-steps the question of whether the emotional aversiveness of shame implies additional costs to normative violations, over and above those associated with expected status losses themselves. When we wonder whether human shame makes people uniquely vulnerable to low-cost social punishment, this is the question of importance.
As argued in Ross (Reference Ross2007), and less directly in Dunbar (Reference Dunbar1996/1998), possession of language, rather than a specially evolved emotional response disposition, may be the key human distinction here. A nonhuman animal's violation of a social norm is likely to be known about and remembered only by actual witnesses. By contrast, news of a person's transgressions can be spread widely through linguistic gossip and stored in the cultural memory of the whole community, thereby multiplying costs to the transgressor. Language also facilitates normative institutions of collective forgiveness: A person's violations can be almost costlessly punished, but then the punishment can also almost costlessly be erased if word is passed around that gestures or actions of restitution have been made. This is socially efficient for collective punishers in an indirect way that amplifies the low direct cost of the punishment action to its administrators. Suppose that only high-cost punishment, such as physical violence, were available. In a society based on specialization of labor, the resulting incapacitation of the transgressor is a collective cost to the community's productivity. A similar point applies to ostracism. Forgiveness conventions that can be encoded linguistically allow effects of punishment on a norm violator's productivity to be cancelled after punishment has been observed to be effective, so the violator's contribution to the social product can potentially be fully restored.
The capacity for language likely did involve a special evolutionary adaptation in the neural structures of early hominids (Deacon Reference Deacon1997). But this may have been sufficient for the establishment of substantially enhanced effectiveness of low-cost punishment to defend communities against free-riding, if emotional discomfort at detecting signs of reduced social status were already in place. Given evidence to date, it seems that postulating any additional special adaptation is gratuitous. Evidently, however, this speculation resting mainly on the point that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence should be investigated by searching experimentally for emotional distress in response to conspecific-observed norm violations in intelligent non-human social animals.