Dana Nau and colleagues study the evolution of 'Third Party Punishment'

Result published in the Royal Society's flagship international biological research journal.

Professor Dr. Dana Nau, two of Dr. Nau's former Ph.D. students: Ryan Carr and Postdoctoral Researcher Patrick Roos, and Psychology Professor Dr. Michele Gelfand study the evolution of 'Third Party Punishment'. Their paper describing the results of this study, "High strength-of-ties and low mobility enable the evolution of third-party punishment" has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. According to Dr. Nau, "This interdisciplinary research is the first time that cross-cultural psychologists and computational game theorists have collaborated to examine the evolution of third-party punishment. The results suggest that the stronger a community’s social ties and the longer most people stay within the community, the more likely it is that otherwise uninvolved third parties will step forward to punish misbehavior."

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