Essay --

The article is a great contribution because of the evidences it provides contrary to the self-interest assumption. The authors discovered that there is a great chance for individuals to voluntarily cooperate by treating everyone fairly and punishing individuals who do not cooperate. They termed it behavioral propensity ‘strong reciprocity’. Empirically, this can contribute in the bringing up of universal cooperation. If purely self-interested behavior would dominate, it can cause breakdown to the cooperation. In addition to this, they showed that the people are willing to punish individuals who act unfairly towards a third person. This then only shows that strong reciprocity is an influencing factor in the enforcement of social norms and norms that suggest participation in collective actions. For an individual to be a strong reciprocator it needs to sacrifice resources to be kind to those who are being good (strong positive reciprocity) and punish those who are not (stro ng negative reciprocity). The very feature of this strong reciprocity is the willingness of these individuals to sa...