[MUD-Dev] Article: Moral Outrage - Bizarre as it seems, indignation makes the world go round (from New Scientist)

[Christopher Allen]

I thought that this was interesting from New Scientist. It has
implications to rating systems like Slashdot, Advogato, various
cooperation incentives, and game economic systems.

-- Christopher Allen

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.. Christopher Allen                                 Skotos Tech Inc. ..
..                           1512 Walnut St., Berkeley, CA 94709-1513 ..
.. <http://www.Skotos.net>               o510/647-2760  f510/647-2761 ..



>From New Scientist magazine, vol 173 issue 2325, 12/01/2002, page 11

  http://archive.newscientist.com/archive.jsp?id=23250800

Moral outrage
12 Jan 02
Anil Ananthaswamy

Bizarre as it seems, indignation makes the world go round

IT'S not love, affection or even blatant self-interest that binds
human societies together. It's anger. Swiss researchers made the
unsettling discovery while trying to fathom what makes people
cooperate.

Traditional explanations, such as kinship and reciprocal altruism,
rely on genetic relationships or self-interest. These work for
animals, but fail for humans because people cooperate with strangers
they may never meet again, and when the pay-off is not obvious.

Such cooperation can be explained if punishment of freeloaders or
"free-riders"-those who do not contribute to a group but benefit
from it-is taken into account. However, in real life, punishment is
rarely without cost to the punisher. So why should someone punish a
free-rider?  Because of emotionally driven altruism, says Ernst
Fehr, an economist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

To test this "altruistic punishment" hypothesis, Fehr and his
colleagues played an experimental game with six groups of four
students each, in which real money was at stake. Each member was
given 20 monetary units (MUs) to keep or invest in a group
project. For every MU invested, the return for the group was 1.6
MUs, which was divided equally among the four members. So if only
one person chose to invest, putting in 1 MU, she got back only 0.4
MU. But if everyone invested the full 20 MUs, they each ended up
with 32 MUs, making total cooperation worthwhile.

Investment, therefore, was always in the interests of the group, but
never in the interest of the individual doing the investing. A
free-rider would benefit from not investing. She could just gain
from the money invested by others. After a series of six games, in
which members' investments were anonymous and everyone invested
simultaneously, Fehr found that members contributed an average of 10
MUs in the first game. But cooperation quickly unravelled, says
Fehr.  Contributions dropped to 4 MUs by the sixth game.

So Fehr decided to allow members to punish free-riders in their
group, but at a cost. If a member punished another, it cost the
punisher 1 MU and the punished 3 MUs. In six such games the average
investment was always higher than in those without punishment,
increasing to over 16 MUs. The threat of punishment sustained
cooperation.

Crucially, the punishment was an altruistic act, as the punisher
would never encounter the same free-rider again. To understand the
motive behind altruistic punishment, the researchers questioned the
students about their emotions. They found that anger appeared to be
the cause.  "At the end of the experiment, people told us that they
were very angry about the free-riders," says Fehr. "Our hypothesis
is that negative emotions are the driving force behind the
punishment."

"It's a great experiment," says Herb Gintis, an expert on human
cooperative behaviour at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Social policies which do not provide an outlet for such emotions
will fail, he says. In the 1980s, for instance, people revolted
against the welfare state in the US because they felt that perceived
freeloaders were not being taken to task.

More at: Nature (vol 415, p 137)





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