The urge to punish
(But first, a followup to my previous entry: my kitchen is not flooded. Whew.)
Was talking with Karen the other night about Rules and the urge to punish those who violate them; and then this morning what should appear in my email but a New York Times article which claims that the urge to punish those who break rules (more specifically, those who cheat, but I think it amounts to roughly the same thing) is not only natural but itself a form of altruism (because it sometimes costs the punisher a great deal to do the punishing). I don't know that I buy the arguments put forth in the article—I'm particularly skeptical of the sociobiological argument that claims that altruism and other civilized social behaviors could not have evolved without the punishment-of-cheaters urge—but the experiment described (a game in which cooperation turned out to work much better if people had a means of punishing cheaters) is an interesting one.