Is altruistic punishment altruistic?

Is altruistic punishment altruistic? Ricardo Andrés Guzmán, Cristián Candia, Leda Cosmides, Carlos Rodriguez-Sickert. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

Abstract: The aim of this investigation is to determine if altruistic punishment in social dilemmas is a robust phenomenon or an artifact of the standard experimental designs, as some authors have suggested (Carpenter and Matthews 2012; Pedersen, Kurzban, and McCullough 2013). To this end we have designed a variant of the public good game with peer punishment. In our public good game, a group of subjects is partitioned into subgroups that play a one-shot public good game. After the game finishes the subjects can punish free riders, even if they belong to other subgroups. Unlike standard social dilemma experiments, our experimental design allows to discriminate altruistic punishment (for the sake of the group) from self-interested punishment (for the sake of the individual who punishes). We hypothesize that the selfish and altruistic (if there is any) motivations will combine in the PG case (N=4) where no subgroups are created, so punishment in this case will be greater than selfish punishment with respect to the case in which experimental subjects participate in two simultaneous prisoner dilemma games. In addition, our experimental design eliminates several artifacts of standard experiments, such as demand characteristics and the preclusion of the bystander effect.