ArticleNature communications2016
Social image concerns promote cooperation more than altruistic punishment.
Article in Nature communications, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 54 citations in OpenAlex.
- Assessing three altruism facets by economic games and self-report: a multitrait-multimethod investigation.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Machine learning assisted CoScientific reports · 2025Article
- The consequences of AI training on human decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Norms prioritizing positive assessments are likely to maintain cooperation in private indirect reciprocity.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Confusion cannot explain cooperative behavior in public goods games.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Do marmosets understand others' conversations? A thermography approach.Science advances · 2021Article
- Paranoia and belief updating during a crisis.Research square · 2021Article
- Altruistic Punishment and Impulsivity in Parkinson's Disease: A Social Neuroscience Perspective.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2020Article
- Article
- Large-scale cooperation driven by reputation, not fear of divine punishment.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- Gossip in the Dictator and Ultimatum Games: Its Immediate and Downstream Consequences for Cooperation.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- Cooperation in Groups of Different Sizes: The Effects of Punishment and Reputation-Based Partner Choice.Frontiers in psychology · 2019Article
- The emergence and selection of reputation systems that drive cooperative behaviour.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2018Article
- Both Rewards and Moral Praise Can Increase the Prosocial Decisions: Revealed in a Modified Ultimatum Game Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2018Article
- Tolerant indirect reciprocity can boost social welfare through solidarity with unconditional cooperators in private monitoring.Scientific reports · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human cooperation is enigmatic, as organisms are expected, by evolutionary and economic theory, to act principally in their own interests. However, cooperation requires individuals to sacrifice resources for each other's benefit. We conducted a series of novel experiments in a foraging society where social institutions make the study of social image and punishment particularly salient. Participants played simple cooperation games where they could punish non-cooperators, promote a positive social image or do so in combination with one another. We show that although all these mechanisms raise cooperation above baseline levels, only when social image alone is at stake do average economic gains rise significantly above baseline. Punishment, either alone or combined with social image building, yields lower gains. Individuals' desire to establish a positive social image thus emerges as a more decisive factor than punishment in promoting human cooperation.
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Registered trials
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.