Re: Vanessa’s Draft
Vanessa,
You draw from a fascinating literature. I surprised a friend of mine yesterday with the sentences about once being a man/woman and now having changed. One thing that ran across my mind on the issue of altruistic punishment. It may be difficult to tell when this is actually occurring because the act of “punishing” here is an act of masculinity – flexing one’s muscles so to speak. So along the relevant metric, the punisher may always – or at least often – stand to gain by appearing more masculine and establishing his place on the masculine pecking order. Does that make sense?
vhettinger
April 15, 2008 @ 10:11 am
I think you’re absolutely right that the analogy might break down here, because the system sets up this form of punishing as something that (while almost certainly exacting costs on the punisher at some level) is rewarded by enhancing the masculine reputation of the punisher.
I have to think about this more and figure how to separate out the costly performance from the positive reinforcement that this performance garners. In the economic model it was easy to see — the punishers gave up one unit and thereby caused the shirkers to lose three, and the experiment was set up (I believe) so that no reputational gains could accrue to the punishers for their action.
You’re very right to point out that this is not the case here, so (as Steve points out in his comments) the selfish rational actor model may not need as much help from the ‘altruistic’ actor theories.