Humans have a strong sense of who should be punished, when, and how. Many features of these intuitions are consistent with a simple adaptive model: Punishment evolved as a mechanism to teach social partners how to behave in future interactions. Yet, it is clear that punishment as practiced in modern contexts transcends any biologically evolved mechanism; it also depends on cultural institutions including the criminal justice system and many smaller analogs in churches, corporations, clubs, classrooms, and so on. These institutions can be thought of as a kind of ‘exaptation’: a culturally evolved set of norms that exploits biologically evolved intuitions about when punishment is deserved in order to achieve cooperative benefits for social groups.
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Fiery Cushman (2015) studied this question.
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