Psychological adaptations for collective action participation

Ancestral humans could have benefited by participating in collective actions, but such participation would have introduced some specific adaptive problems as well. E.g., participants would have needed to (1) avoid being disadvantaged compared to ‘free riding’ co-participants, and (2) elicit contributions from co-participants in order to ensure collective success. Participants could have achieved these goals by selectively administrating punishments and rewards to co-participants, and the goal of this talk is to illuminate how people may be adapted to do so. Data collected among California undergraduates and Ecuadorian hunter-horticulturalists suggest that (1) participants are highly skilled at assessing the extent of co-participant contributions, and they allocate more social status to higher-contributors; (2) the psychological system producing punitive sentiment towards low-contributors was designed to reduce free rider advantages, (3) the psychological system producing pro-reward sentiment towards high-contributors was designed to elicit contributions; (4) individuals who regularly participate in collective actions exhibit a collective action-specific morality, e.g. they are more likely to identify and punish free riders in an experimental collective action scenario.