A Cooperative Species Quotes

“) A man ought to be a friend to his friend and repay gift with gift. People should meet smiles with smiles and lies with treachery. A man ought to be a friend to his friend and also to his friend’s friend. But no one should be friendly with a friend of his foe.”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“Many observers of experimental games have interpreted the fact that people sometimes sacrifice material gain in favor of moral sentiment as an indication of irrationality, the term “rationality” being misused as a synonym for “consistent pursuit of self-interest.” But subjects appear to be no less rational when deciding to cooperate and punish than when they compare prices to decide what to cook for dinner”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“punishment is in part non-strategic comes from the public goods experiment of Drew Fudenberg and Parag Pathak (2010). As in the standard game, following each round of contributions subjects were given information on the contributions of fellow group members and had the opportunity to deduct some of their own payoffs in order to lower the payoffs of another in the group. But unlike the usual treatment, in which the targets of punishment were informed of the level of punishment they received after each round, in the Fudenberg and Pathak experiment the levels of punishment were not to be revealed until the experiment was over, and those who punished others knew this. Thus the experimental design ruled out modifying the behavior of shirkers as a motive for punishment.”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“Yet as we saw subjects treat contribution and punishment differently. After the initial rounds in the standard public goods without punishment game, experimental subjects decline to contribute altruistically but once punishment is permitted they avidly engage in the altruistic activity of punishing low contributors. Part of the reason for the difference is that people have an intrinsic motivation to punish shirkers, not simply an instrumental desire to alter their behavior or to affect the distribution of payoffs to either reduce unfairness or enhance one’s own relative payoffs.”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“In experiments we commonly observe that people sacrifice their own payoffs in order to cooperate with others, to reward the cooperation of others, and to punish free-riding, even when they cannot expect to gain from acting this way. We call the preferences motivating this behavior strong reciprocity, the term “strong” intended to distinguish this set of preferences from entirely amoral and self-regarding reciprocation that would not be undertaken in the absence of some payback.”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“Cooperative behavior may confer benefits net of costs on the individual cooperator, and thus could be motivated entirely by self-interest. Market exchange is an example. In this case, cooperation is a form of mutualism, namely an activity that confers net benefits both on the actor and on others. But cooperation may also impose net costs upon individuals in the sense that not cooperating would increase their fitness or other material payoffs. In this case cooperative behavior constitutes a form of altruism (see”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“For most animals, genetic transmission and individual learning are about all there is as far as information acquisition is concerned. Humans, by contrast, also acquire information from one another through a process of social learning.”
― Samuel Bowles, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“... the idea that selfish genes must produce selfish individuals is false.”
― Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution

“Optimizing models are commonly used to describe behavior not because they mimic the cognitive processes of the actors, which they rarely do, but because they capture important influences on individual behavior in a succinct and analytically tractable way.”
― Samuel Bowles, Herbert Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution