It seems we humans have evolved a powerful sense of fairness. So powerful, in fact, that we would rather walk away with nothing than permit someone else to take unfair advantage of us. Researchers call this “altruistic punishment.” These results, and others like them, suggest that, over thousands of generations, our social intelligence was molded by cooperative group dynamics to evolve an innate sense of fairness and a drive to punish those who flagrantly break the rules, even at our own expense. This intrinsic sense of fairness is, in the view of some researchers, the extra ingredient that
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