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A fascinating little paper came out in PNAS last week, Centralized sanctioning and legitimate authority promote cooperation in humans^{10.1073/pnas.1105456108} (open access). Selected for F1000 by FM in Ecology Karl Sigmund, the authors took pre-existing communities–1,543 Ugandan farmers in 50 producer cooperatives–and got them to play a variant of a public goods game (PGG). In these games, people are given endowments–tokens representing money, say–and spend a proportion of their endowment in each round of the game. What the players spend is usually doubled and redistributed throughout the entire community, but what the players don’t spend, they keep. This sets up a tension among the players–the most profitable course of action for an individual is not to spend anything, but the best outcome for the group is if everybody spends everything. Humans being human, what happens in these scenarios is interesting. Some people are generous, and some will freeload. It’s a microcosm of society as a whole.

In a PGG there can be an inbuilt mechanism for punishing freeloaders–players are allowed to spend tokens to reduce another player’s payoff. In this study, the authors first appointed a single player, a monitor, to mete out punishment to those who would not cooperate. Then in a variation they let the players elect a monitor with the same powers, by secret ballot.

With an arbitrary monitor, cooperation increased as you might expect–the threat of punishment lead to a sustained, higher level of cooperation (as measured by how much money the players contributed to the community). But when the players themselves elected the monitor, there was a further (sustained) increase in community spirit. (If you look in the supplemental information, you’ll also see that the elected monitors tended to be disproportionately male, locally born, more educated and richer. There’s a story right there, isn’t there?)

Karl Sigmund writes, “We may interpret the usual peer-punishment scenario as reflecting a state of anarchy,” while the experiment with the elected monitor “an early step towards institutionalized sanctioning”–or, if you like, a state where the police is answerable to a democratically elected administration. The perceived legitimacy of an authority determines how well people will act in the interests of a community as a whole, that is to obey the laws and mores of that community.

Or put another way, if there is to be a sanctioning authority, then we’d damn well better have a say in who is wielding the big stick.