Punitive sentiment against successful individuals as a psychological device for anti-hidden free riders in ancestral hunter-gatherers.

The evolutionary roots of Envy and Social Justice

Copyrights 2003 Alberto Gmez Corona.

(ask me for reproduction: agocorona@gmail.com)

Abstract
Along the human evolution, some collective activities, like group defense and hunting were vital for survival. For these activities to be stable in evolutionary terms, the Evolutionary Game Theory (Axelrod, 1981) predicts the need to increase the costs incurred by free-riders by whatever means. Otherwise, the free riding behaviour would be favoured by evolution over the collaborative one. Some evidences of an instinct that serves this purpose, and its architecture has been discovered experimentally (Price, Tooby, Cosmides, 2002). However, before punishing, the free rider has to be discovered, and the discovery is itself a problem to be solved. Sometimes this discovery is very difficult, and the details of this detection mechanism is the purpose of this work. Here I propose that, with the increasing sophistication of the characteristics and attributes relevant to social interactions, some emerging free riding behaviours, hidden to direct verification, threatened the evolutionary stability of collective activities. Such free- riding behaviours were the lies and simulations associated to psychological rewards such are status, respect, friendship, as well as sophisticated ways to contribute, such are ideas, organizational skills etc. For that purpose a special circuitry in the brain evolved to appreciate the unexpected display of goods, health, and status, as clues of either extraction of more rewards than expected or to invest less efforts than expected in collective activities. This mechanism was possible because the small number of individuals that compose the groups of hunter-gatherers and the rare encounter with other groups permitted a detailed, individual accountability of each one status, rights, ownerships, perceived efforts, due favours between them etc. Therefore, a intuitive expectancy was possible about behaviour and wealth, fitness, status, deserved rewards and collective efforts expected for each individual. The result of this subjective, self-centered balance, carried out by this menta module is the one that create the sentiment called Envy. I theorize also about how this module contribute to other sentiments associated with the primitive notion of justice.

Ill try to show that there are, in fact, examples of such kind of hidden free riding in hunter gatherer groups. Additionally, I will show that these kind of hidden free riders display adequate indicators to facilitate the evolution of the detection mechanism, the corresponding countermeasures for hiding such detection and the resulting stable strategies. Finally I will show that the behaviours resulting from this evolved module correspond to well known attitudes and feelings today and explain, with more detail, some social facts than alternate theories.

Examples of HFR
As noted by Michael Price, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, (2002):
Researchers have long noted that cooperators are sometimes motivated by a desire to win prestige, respect, friendship, and other social and psychological objectives (Olson, 1965, p. 60). Many anthropologists have argued that in environments most similar to those in which humans evolved, reward (especially, increased social status) apparently does motivate individuals to provide public goods such as food (Hawkes,1993; Lemonnier, 1996; Sugiyama, 1996) and military service (Chagnon, 1988; Patton, 1996,2000; Watson, 1971).

Hence, it seems likely that there are motivational adaptations for providing rewards to those who contribute to collective actions. The rewards are not necessarily any immediate physical advantages, but a possible increase in future rewards in terms of relative prestige, respect, status, friendship in relation to the whole group or certain group members. These attributes comes to be the currency that can be exchanged lately, from time to time, for more tangible goods that directly enhance survival and reproduction: food, sex, support in critical situations etc. These psychological rewards implies the corresponding existence of evolved brain modules in charge of maintain, actualize and evaluate the relative merits, deserved rewards, past achievements etc for each individual. The details of these modules are not in the scope of this study. What is important is to note that some form of evaluation of others behavior evolved, probably in parallel with the need to reward collaborators and, I propose, to punish the new kinds of free-riding associated with such new kinds of rewards. Hypothetically, although not crucial for this study, it may be feasible that these psychological rewards may have evolved because, among other things, some collective activities had no direct physical shareable rewards as result of this activity, for example, the group defense. In other cases, when although the collective activity produces rewards to share, some individuals may have enough of the produced good, and to borrow more quantity of it is not enough to motivate it (for example, in the case of a good hunter). It is feasible in evolutionary terms that, if the possible contribution of an skillful individual is available for a collective activity whose results he has already more than enough, it should be rewarded in a currency that he can appreciate if the group need him to devote his best efforts on it. Thus, to the ancient notion of status, tied to efficiency in patterns of relative strength and individual fighting abilities was complemented with new parameters that measured

what each member deserved for his contribution to the collective good in relation with their qualities and the perceived reward on the collective action. The inherent individual nature of these evaluations precluded an objective assessment of efforts and rewards. That complicated the detection of free riding and the initiation of the needed collective punishing, in the terms detailed by Price, Cosmides and Tooby. The advent of language complicated further the control of free-riding, because the use of language would have opened the door for a sophistication of deceptive behaviour: This repertoire includes lies, simulations etc. Furthermore another complication, added with the enhanced communication and coordination of the language, was the increasing importance of psychological contributions, such are, for example, the ability to think about new strategies and ideas for better achieving a given group task. Another examples are organization skills, communication abilities and so on. Such intangible efforts and the deferred rewards in terms of rank and status demands an additional load of new brain circuitry for evaluation of other individuals and their new capabilities, as well as the memorization of the resulting data. Here is a list of candidate strategies for hidden free riding, with increasing sophistication order. The efforts and rewards are presented with the assumption that there is no punishment:

Robbery: Steal the results of gathering or hunting. ( free riding in terms of less efforts, more rewards) Not to collaborate enough in hunting activities (less effort, same rewards) To tease about own effort, claiming equal or more effort than the others (less effort, same or more rewards) To minimize the previous rewards, in order to reclaim more (same effort, more rewards) To emphasize the own needs in order to reclaim more rewards (same effort, more rewards) To claim a higher status trough emphasizing own merits (same effort, more rewards)

Some clues of hidden free riding in these examples could be, at first sight: Unexpected good health, strength, sexual partners Unexpected ownerships: food, tools Unexpected good attitude Display of non deserved status Some additional clues will be justified later. In the sophisticated social life that the language and other higher functions created, free-riding includes any collective activity in which the effort invested by the individual is less than the effort expected by the rest of the individuals or, else, the rewards are more than the expected by the rest of them (or both). This involves reasonable expectations

of others efforts and rewards. This calculation of expectations would have evolved to optimize, for each individual the involvement of the others in group activities. The enforcement of such optimization of others behaviour was possible trough coalitions of individuals against the ones that either does not collaborate than expected or get more rewards than expected. That detection-punishment and evaluation evolved in parallel and reinforced between them. The details of this evolution have to be studied in detail. If the optimization of others capabilities is the real target, not only the rewards are object of evaluation but also the individual capabilities that can be invested in the collective task. Michael Price, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, (2002) suggest that free riding, when the group has enough consensus or power, may include not only free riders properly said, that is, the individuals that may have had more rewards than efforts in case that they have collaborated, but also including non participants that are not free riders, that is, these individuals for which the participation would impose more effort than reward. According with that assumption it can be expected that this mechanism look also for clues of investing less effort than the expected besides the above clues for having more reward than expected. In the other side, the clues that imply more efforts and less rewards than expected for each individual are publicized by the individuals themselves, because in collective activities, at the time to invest efforts and demand rewards, this information is in their own benefit. Therefore, this kind of information is not hard to get. To summarize, it is likely that the clues that are subject of detection and evaluation are, non-exhaustively: good health, good wealth, high status, good strength, cleverness, political skills, display of low efforts. Other clues of deceptive behaviour such are lies and simulations are detected and stored also in order to evaluate future behaviour.

Asynchronous effort/reward coevolution

Since effort and reward hardly are simultaneous, it is advantageous for two individuals to wait for reward in exchange for a certain effort. An example of synchronous cooperation is the barter but there aren't much more examples of that. This delay open new cooperation opportunities. More delay means more possibilities to exchange present effort for future rewards that where not present at the moment of the effort, and thus the exchange would have been impossible without the acceptance of the delay. The advent of language opened new ways for establishing such kind of compromises. In the meantime the debt is stored in the reciprocators brains. The emerging notion of status may have evolved to accommodate this new kind of data, among others.

Dynamic HFR detection vs. hiding

The free riders would minimize the risk of detection trough hiding their clues, either simulating less health, ownerships, not emphasizing the status when not needed etc. This makes detection to become more subtle and the appreciation of clues of HFR would have been difficult. It is feasible to think that the punishment of this detection mechanism would have been excited proportionately to the consensus among the group members.

Because the HFR can develop counter strategies to minimize HFR clues, the evaluation of group punishment could only be done by aggregating the evaluations of all the individuals. As the clues of individuals with positive HFR evaluations increase, the feeling for punishment grows in a sort of chain reaction. The initial state could be perceived as a personal envy by the evaluator, especially when it is not clear if the HFR is damaging for the group or the individual alone. For example, when a display of non deserved status is appreciated by an individual, he could perceive it as personal envy. Because that, the individual looks for other possible harmed individuals to make coalitions. This effect could explain many group behaviors: from apparent spontaneous explosions of group anger to modern mass manipulation techniques with the excitation against a third individual or group. This suggest a second level of free riding: the exploitation of this collective mechanism by claiming of others false free riding for egoistic purposes, for example, to acquire leadership, status or to obtain coalition against personal enemies. A third level of free riding happens when other individuals agree with the manipulative exploitation of the second level free rider because this coalition serves other secondary purposes. This coalitional nature of envy, tending to fragmentation, makes it potentially dangerous for the whole group survival. This probably explain why the envy is strongly repressed in all the groups, simply to avoid these new levels of free riding introduced by the nature of the detection mechanism. Cases and scenarios Additionally the detection mechanism would have been excited when the free riding activity can not be investigated directly by its own nature. When the hunting activity involves collaboration but the members have not been monitorized, the proposed detection mechanism is active. A further degree of sophistication appears when the effort itself is psychological as well: for example, the exercise of leadership, coordination, new ideas for solving group problems. The outcomes of these actions are the main factors being evaluated. In the other side, the detection mechanism is not activated in the case of well observable efforts and rewards, for example, in the case of gathering. Another activation factor could be, for each individual, the subjective benefit of this activity for each member of the group (Michael Price, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides 1), apparently because it is directly related to the individual damage that causes the free riding activity.

HFR punishment and Envy

It was already suggested the relation of this punishing mechanism and personal envy. Envy is present in people of all cultures. It is part of the Donald E. Brown list of Human universals (1991) referred in the MIT encyclopedia of Cognitive sciences (wilson & Keil, 1999). The definition of envy is very diffuse and has negative connotations. Of the three definitions of envy in the Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy: Envy is pain at the good fortune of others. (Aristotle, Rhetoric, Bk II, Chapter 10)

Envy is a propensity to view the well-being of others with distress, even though it does not detract from one's own. [It is] a reluctance to see our own well-being overshadowed by another's because the standard we use to see how well off we are is not the intrinsic worth of our own well-being but how it compares with that of others. [Envy] aims, at least in terms of one's wishes, at destroying others' good fortune. (Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals 6:459) Envy is that passion which views with malignant dislike the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess. (Kant, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 244)

All these definitions are in a context of envy to a rival in which no evident pain has been inflicted. But, still it is a sentiment directed towards either the punishment of the rival or else, the suppression of the attribute envied. A sentiment characterized as such is a clear match for the detection-punishment mechanism studied here. Because this sentiment can move to form a coalition, the chain mechanism explained above can drive the process from individual envy to a form of justice. "Its not envy, is justice" is the envious argument. Because the moral instincts evolved for the preservation of the group, personal envy isolated is bad for the group, because it break the group cohesion, The negative connotations of personal envy mutates into a positive moral perception when the punitive sentiment spread the whole group according with the chain reaction explained before. Group envy is seen as a positive sentiment, since it restores a perceived lack of contribution to the group. These are perceptions, I propose, associated with HFR detection and the moral instincts.

Insuficiencies of the model. Other related mental modules

However, the display the mentioned characteristics are not ever a automatic trigger of such ancestral HFR detection. Many cultures display conformity with inequalities, specially the ones that are stable in time. The studied mental device does not account for such conformance to the inequalities. Some other factors affect the behaviour against the mentioned clues of HFR.

Jeffrey P. Carpenter and Peter H. Matthews (2002) did a survey and use behavioral data from surveys and experiments to show that the theory called social reciprocity in which people punish norm violators indiscriminately explains punishment best. They also show that social reciprocity can evolve in a population of free riders and contributors if the initial conditions are favorable. The norm violators could be free riders as well as over-contributors. Apparently this is in contradiction with a continuous evaluation of others contribution and the punishment of free riders only. But, what happens when there are no clear norms or something occurs that have no norm for it? It is clear that this mechanism does not explain the existence of norms and the mechanism for creating them. Additionally, this alternate theory suggest that any arbitrary norm can be accepted and enforced, but that is nonsense.

Both explanations can be complemented by introducing the basic idea of economy of computation: The mutual evaluation of others efforts and rewards, in the way it is proposed, is a costly calculation and needs the availability of historic data that can refer far back in time, even in past generations, because some rewards, like status for example, are inherited in primates as well as in men. Additionally, there is no guaranty to have enough information for such evaluation mechanism as a general device for the hidden free riding detection in the sense explained above. Due to these shortcomings, a cheaper computation is preferred if it is possible: when some situation has happened in the past, the human mind can detect regularities that link similarities between past experiences and new ones in order to avoid extra brain computation. The rules we are interested here are the result of past histories of changes in the group and the resulting behaviors that ended in a new equilibrium. This equilibrium collects the new balance between the individual and collective interests. Such equilibrium has been reached trough mutial evaluation. So the HFR detection and punishment operates in non-completely known situations, whereas the cheaper, social norm-based mechanism operates in well known situations in which clear rules are available. In the punishment experiment of Jeffrey P. Carpenter Peter H. Matthews mentioned above, the norm punish everyone that does not spend 70% of their money for collective well being has been a norm created in a dynamic interaction in which each member has found that even over-contributors challenge their own well being if this overcontributions comes to be the new norm. The interpretation, in more complicated social situation is that, upon an unexpected event related with some elses rewards, the mechanism such is the HFR detection is activated. The free riding /anti free riding conflict ends in a new equilibrium between collaboration and selfishness that maximizes the cost/benefit of each individual in relation with other alternatives, and consolidates a behaviour accepted by the members as a rule that is followed and enforced. This sequence of events can be experienced in many situations today. It is more feasible to excite the rule based behavior in situations in which little information is available, or else, when the event does not affect substantially to the individual: such situations happens when exist little direct contact between the evaluator and the evaluated. This happens in traditional societies with clear-cut norms, with little inter-class mobility, among individuals of different classes. In contrast, among close citizens of the same class, the situation is the opposite: the detailed computation is possible and may be the preferred one.

Sociological consequences in modern life

According with the latter mechanism, it is expected that, in highly traditional societies, for which very clear and strict class migration rules are enforced, there are

less class conflicts and less punitive sentiments among classes. This appears to be the case, although no anthropological study is know by the author at this time. In contrast, one characteristic of modern life is the technological political and sociological change. From the two mechanisms explained above for avoiding free riding in ancestral populations, the norm-based can not be used very much. According with the highly plausible hypothesis of Barkov(1995), The information available in modern social life excites the psychological mechanisms for ancestral social life information. The proposed hypotheses for anti hidden free riding can give a more detailed explanation of some aspects of modern life. In the modern world, thanks to the information technologies, we have minute information about many people with a high status that would be not discovered if these technologies were not available. However, there is no longer the possibility of an accurate evaluation of merits, status, efforts in collective actions for these people, and direct punishment is not possible. We live in a globalized environment with anonymous people in which we have fragmented information about others efforts and rewards. Usually this information is biased toward the emphasis in the benefits that the people receive, while their corresponding individual efforts and their individual contributions for the social well being are either not assessable or are ignored. This bias is naturally explained by the architecture of the proposed mental device: This hypothesis explain, partially at least, the disparity in the public interest (and thus the information bias) on two different kinds of information about the life of other people: On the one hand, some aspects that may be easily interpreted as clues of ancestral free-riding: health, fitness, sex partners etc. On the other hand the sign of social merits, for example, the work, their humanitarian activities etc have not such demand of information: the formers were hard to obtain and were hidden by the potential free riders in the natural environment, while the latter ones were directly publicized by the individuals in order to obtain more social rewards. The natural affinity for the first kind of information and the lack of interest for the second is the natural outcome of this HFR detection mechanism. This hypothesis also naturally explains in more detail the phenomenon of gossip than the alternative hypothesis about a mere general interest on some others salient life aspects. (Barkov, 1995). In this context, any indirect indication of free riding is transmitted and even exaggerated. That is the case of misbehaviour or fraudulent activity when additional clues of HFR are displayed, for example, in the case of rich people (wealth display). Many social phenomenons are also in agreement with the proposed chain reaction mechanism for the group detection of HFR and the subsequent punishment. Thus, if we have such HFR detection mechanism, in the current world this mechanism could be continuously activated. The direct relation between the increase of

communication means and the excitement of this punishing sentiment among people, that this mechanism suggest, gives a hint to explain, interestingly, the historical correlation between the development of communications, the interclass mobility and the success of some collective and egalitarian ideologies.

Bibliography
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