Spare the rod and spoil the group's cultural fitness? Conditions under which corporal punishment leads to detrimental and beneficial outcomes

Abstract

Corporal punishment of children is common across human history, and the specific practice of striking the buttocks, known as spanking, seems to have developed independently across a number of separate cultures. This pattern suggests adaptive value, posing a paradox in view of the many reviews stating that spanking has purely negative outcomes on future mental health, and the recommendation of the American Academy of Pediatrics that it be outlawed. We purport to resolve this paradox by separating this particular type of corporal punishment from less controlled lashing out in anger, and we reanalyze these reviews in terms of psychological and physical health outcomes. We find that spanking is associated with positive mental health outcomes when (1) performed by calm parents in a (2) ritualized, structured fashion and combined with (3) other disciplinary techniques within (4) a loving relationship with the child, typically (5) as part of the practice of moral, collective religiosity, and when (6) controlling for confounding variables. In that spanking is noticeably practiced by conservative religious cultural groups, we hypothesize that it can be a fitness-promoting form of behaviour in line with religiousness being an example of a group-fitness-promoting adaptation.

Keywords: Evolutionary psychology; Fitness-promoting adaptation; Group selection; Health; Punishment; Spanking.