ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
Cheating and punishment in cooperative animal societies.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 28 papers.
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Who cites it
28 citing papers in PubMed.
- Ecological inheritance facilitates the coexistence of environmental helpers and free riders.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Reciprocity evolves more readily in competitive than cooperative socio-ecologies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Indirect punishment can outperform direct punishment in promoting cooperation in structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- To Bees or Not to Bees: Greater Honeyguides Sometimes Guide Humans to Animals Other Than Bees, but Likely Not as Punishment.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- The evolution of division of labour: preconditions and evolutionary feedback.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Multiple distinct evolutionary mechanisms govern the dynamics of selfish mitochondrial genomes in Caenorhabditis elegans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A novel open-source cultivation system helps establish the first full cycle chemosynthetic symbiosis model system involving the giant ciliateFrontiers in microbiology · 2024Article
- Cooperative virulence via the collective action of secreted pathogen effectors.Nature microbiology · 2023Article
- Evolution-proof inhibitors of public good cooperation: a screening strategy inspired by social evolution theory.FEMS microbiology reviews · 2022Article
- Optimizing the social utility of judicial punishment: An evolutionary biology and neuroscience perspective.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
- Is it good to be bad? An evolutionary analysis of the adaptive potential of psychopathic traits.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Altruism and Phenoptosis as Programs Supported by Evolution.Biochemistry. Biokhimiia · 2021Article
- Nutrient status shapes selfish mitochondrial genome dynamics across different levels of selection.eLife · 2020Article
- Dynamic utility: the sixth reciprocity mechanism for the evolution of cooperation.Royal Society open science · 2020Article
- The smell of hunger: Norway rats provision social partners based on odour cues of need.PLoS biology · 2020Article
- Watching eyes do not stop dogs stealing food: evidence against a general risk-aversion hypothesis for the watching-eye effect.Scientific reports · 2020Article
- Article
- Neural architecture of the vertebrate brain: implications for the interaction between emotion and cognition.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2019Review
- Social feeding behavior ofFrontiers in ecology and evolution · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Cheaters-genotypes that gain a selective advantage by taking the benefits of the social contributions of others while avoiding the costs of cooperating-are thought to pose a major threat to the evolutionary stability of cooperative societies. In order for cheaters to undermine cooperation, cheating must be an adaptive strategy: cheaters must have higher fitness than cooperators, and their behaviour must reduce the fitness of their cooperative partners. It is frequently suggested that cheating is not adaptive because cooperators have evolved mechanisms to punish these behaviours, thereby reducing the fitness of selfish individuals. However, a simpler hypothesis is that such societies arise precisely because cooperative strategies have been favoured over selfish ones-hence, behaviours that have been interpreted as 'cheating' may not actually result in increased fitness, even when they go unpunished. Here, we review the empirical evidence for cheating behaviours in animal societies, including cooperatively breeding vertebrates and social insects, and we ask whether such behaviours are primarily limited by punishment. Our review suggests that both cheating and punishment are probably rarer than often supposed. Uncooperative individuals typically have lower, not higher, fitness than cooperators; and when evidence suggests that cheating may be adaptive, it is often limited by frequency-dependent selection rather than by punishment. When apparently punitive behaviours do occur, it remains an open question whether they evolved in order to limit cheating, or whether they arose before the evolution of cooperation.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.