Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans-2011.pdf

Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans Delia Baldassarria,1 and Guy Grossmanb aDepartment of Sociology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544; and bDepartment of Political Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027 Edited by Michael Hout, University of California, Berkeley, CA, and approved May 26, 2011 (received for review April 5, 2011) Social sanctioning is widely considered a successful strategy to promote cooperation among humans. In situations in which in- dividual and collective interests are at odds, incentives to free-ride induce individuals to refrain from contributing to public goods provision. Experimental evidence from public goods games shows that when endowed with sanctioning powers, conditional cooper- ators can discipline defectors, thus leading to greater levels of cooperation. However, extant evidence is based on peer punish- ment institutions, whereas in complex societies, systems of control are often centralized: for instance,wedonot sanction our neighbors for driving too fast, the police do. Here we show the effect of cen- tralized sanctioning and legitimate authority on cooperation. We designed an adaptation of the public goods game inwhich sanction- ing power is given to a single monitor, and we experimentally ma- nipulated the process by which the monitor is chosen. To increase the external validity of the study, we conducted lab-in-the-field experiments involving 1,543 Ugandan farmers from 50 producer cooperatives. This research provides evidence of the effectiveness of centralized sanctioning and demonstrates the causal effect of legitimacy on cooperation: participants are more responsive to the authority of an elected monitor than a randomly chosen monitor. Our essay contributes to the literature on the evolution of cooper- ation by introducing the idea of role differentiation. In complex societies, cooperative behavior is not only sustained bymechanisms of selection and reciprocity among