Abstract

Punishment systems are central to human cooperation, and they are remarkably diverse. Punishment can take the form of revenge from victims, intervention from third parties, or sanctioning from institutional representatives. Yet, although punishment takes place in a rich relational context, prior work has largely studied it in interactions between strangers, obscuring who is punishing whom and on whose behalf. In this talk, I argue that embedding punishment in social relationships can improve our understanding of its prevalence and variation across human societies. I present a new cross-cultural dataset of 3,961 ethnographic texts from 60 largely nonindustrial societies. Each text was coded for the presence of second- and third-party punishment (TPP), and for sub-forms of TPP enacted on behalf of kin, social partners, or the broader community. Results show that TPP is widespread across human societies, but its forms vary with socioecology. While TPP on behalf of kin is positively associated with kinship intensity, generalized TPP on behalf of community members is positively associated with technological and social differentiation. These patterns suggest that TPP in small-scale societies is neither rare nor primarily the work of individual moralistic enforcers. Instead, it often involves individuals protecting their kin, groups sharing the costs of enforcement, or representatives acting on a delegated role. Rather than a single continuum from informal to institutional enforcement, we observe distinct punishment regimes that track different features of socioecology.

Reference

Catherine Molho, “Punishment in relational context: evidence from 60 societies”, IAST Lunch Seminar, Toulouse: IAST, June 5, 2026, 11:30–12:30, room Auditorium 5 (Third floor - TSE Building).