Altruistic Punishment and Cooperation

"The nature of human altruism (helping others), and the role of altruistic punishment (paying a cost to punish those that don’t help others) in establishing cooperation and a bases for sociality, are currently two of the most active areas of research in the behavioural sciences. Nearly every aspect of altruism and cooperation you can think of is being explored: how altruistic behaviour and willingness to punish non-altruists varies across societies with differing social systems (and also what universal trends underlie human altruism); how this variation relates to economic and demographic factors; how people respond to punishment for not cooperating, in both laboratory and real-world situations; the role of institutions that embody social norms of behaviour in maintaining cooperation; and what’s going on in the brain when we cooperate and defect in games of altruism with other human players." /Smart Mobs/