Pat Barclay’s research while affiliated with University of Guelph and other places

Punishment plays a role in human cooperation, but it is costly. Prior research shows that people are more cooperative when they expect to receive negative feedback for non-cooperation, even in the absence of costly punishment, which would have interesting implications for theory and applications. However, based on theories of habituation and cue-based learning, we propose that people will learn to ignore expressions of disapproval that are not clearly associated with material costs or benefits. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a between-subjects, 40-round public goods game (i.e. much longer than most studies), where participants could respond to others’ contributions by sending numerical disapproval messages, paying to reduce others’ earnings, or neither. Consistent with previous results, we observed steadily increasing contributions in the costly punishment condition. In contrast, contributions declined after the early rounds in the expressed disapproval condition, and were eventually no higher than the basic control condition with neither costly punishment nor disapproval ratings. In other words, costless disapproval may temporarily increase cooperation, but the effects fade. We discuss the theoretical and applied implications of our findings, including the unexpectedly high levels of cooperation in a second control condition.

Why do we care so much for friends—much more than one might predict from reciprocity alone? According to a recent theory, organisms who cooperate with each other come to have a stake in each other’s well-being: A good cooperator is worth protecting—even anonymously if necessary—so they can be available to cooperate in the future. Here, we present three experiments showing that reciprocity creates a stake in a partner’s well-being, such that people are willing to secretly pay to protect good cooperative partners, if doing so keeps those partners available for future interaction. Participants played five rounds of a cooperative game (Prisoner’s Dilemma) and then received an opportunity to help their partner, without the partner ever knowing. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants were more willing to help a cooperative partner if doing so kept that partner available for future rounds, compared to when the help simply raised the partner’s earnings. This effect was specific to cooperative partners: The type of help mattered less for uncooperative partners or for recipients that participants did not directly interact with. In other words, an ongoing history of reciprocity gave people a stake in their partner’s good condition but not their partner’s payoff. Experiment 3 showed that participants had less stake in their partners if those partners could be easily replaced by another cooperator. These findings show that reciprocity and stake are not separate processes. Instead, even shallow reciprocity creates a deeper stake in a partner’s well-being, including a willingness to help with zero expectation of recognition. Future work should examine how one’s stake in partners is affected by ecological factors that affect the gains of cooperation and the ease of finding new partners.

Recently, Judd et al. (2022) reported that, contrary to Arnocky et al. (2017), there is no link between altruism and indices of mating success. However, a reanalysis of the open-source data revealed coding and analytical errors which, when corrected, provided consistent support for the initial findings of Arnocky et al. that altruism positively predicts self-reported mating success and in-pair copulation controlling for sex, age, and personality dimensions. Furthermore, in contrast to the initial report by Judd et al., altruism is positively correlated with, and predicts, lifetime number of sex partners and the number of casual sex partners; however, entry of covariates (particularly age and extraversion) attenuates these relations. Judd et al.’s mischaracterization of their research as a direct replication of Arnocky et al., coupled with the statistical errors, data transformation issues, and faulty interpretation of their results, calls into serious question their claim of a failed “replication.”

People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals’ endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards.

Moral licensing occurs when someone who initially behaved morally subsequently acts less morally. We apply reputation-based theories to predict when and why moral licensing would occur. Specifically, our pre-registered predictions were that (1) participants observed during the licensing manipulation would have larger licensing effects, and (2) unambiguous dependent variables would have smaller licensing effects. In a pre-registered multi-level meta-analysis of 111 experiments (N = 19,335), we found a larger licensing effect when participants were observed (Hedge’s g = 0.61) compared to unobserved (Hedge’s g = 0.14). Ambiguity did not moderate the effect. The overall moral licensing effect was small (Hedge’s g = 0.18). We replicated these analyses using robust Bayesian meta-analysis and found strong support for the moral licensing effect only when participants are observed. These results suggest that the moral licensing effect is predominantly an interpersonal effect based on reputation, rather than an intrapsychic effect based on self-image.

People vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, impacting a range of social and political phenomena. People also vary in the degree to which they perceive disparate dangers as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions likely regularly offered direct and indirect avenues for addressing hazards; consequently, via multiple possible pathways, orientations toward tradition and toward danger may have become associated. Emerging research documents connections between individual differences in traditionalism and variation in threat responsivity in general, and pathogen-avoidance motivations in particular. Importantly, because threat-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, the precise associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance likely depend on contextually contingent costs and benefits. The COVID-19 pandemic requires individuals to make decisions about consequential and costly pathogen-avoidance behaviors that can clash with other priorities. The pandemic therefore provides a real-world setting in which to test the posited relationship between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance across socio-political contexts. Across 27 societies (N = 7,844), we find that costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors positively correlate with greater endorsement of traditional norms and values in a majority of countries. Accounting for the conflict that arises in some societies between public health precautions and competing priorities, such as the exercise of personal liberties, reveals a consistent relationship between traditionalism and COVID-19 precautions across an even wider range of social and cultural contexts. These findings support the thesis that traditionalism is associated with an enhanced tendency to attend to hazards.

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries showed a small relation between pathogen disgust sensitivity (an individual-difference measure of pathogen-avoidance motivations) and measures of antigay attitudes. Analyses also showed that pathogen disgust sensitivity relates not only to antipathy toward gay men and lesbians, but also to negativity toward other groups, in particular those associated with violations of traditional sexual norms (e.g., prostitutes). These results suggest that the association between pathogen-avoidance motivations and antigay attitudes is relatively stable across cultures and is a manifestation of a more general relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice towards groups associated with sexual norm violations.

Third-party punishment is thought to act as an honest signal of cooperative intent and such signals might escalate when competing to be chosen as a partner. Here, we investigate whether partner choice competition prompts escalating investment in third-party punishment. We also consider the case of signalling via helpful acts to provide a direct test of the relative strength of the two types of signals. Individuals invested more in third-party helping than third-party punishment and invested more in both signals when observed compared to when investments would be unseen. We found no clear effect of partner choice (over and above mere observation) on investments in either punishment or helping. Third-parties who invested more than a partner were preferentially chosen for a subsequent Trust Game although the preference to interact with the higher investor was more pronounced in the help than in the punishment condition. Third-parties who invested more were entrusted with more money and investments in third-party punishment or helping reliably signalled trustworthiness. Individuals who did not invest in third-party helping were more likely to be untrustworthy than those who did not invest in third-party punishment. This supports the conception of punishment as a more ambiguous signal of cooperative intent compared to help.