Paul Bingham calls this “coalition enforcement,” highlighting the fact that norm violators are punished by a coalition, that is, people acting in concert.6 Christopher Boehm calls it a “reverse dominance hierarchy,”7 where instead of the strongest apes dominating the group, in humans it’s the rest of the group, working together, that’s able to dominate the strongest apes and keep them effectively in check. What both thinkers identify as a key to enabling this kind of behavior, in our species and ours alone, is the use of deadly weapons
