Restorative justice preferred among the Enga in Papua New Guinea

All human groups create systems for regulating cultural norms to maintain cooperation in society. Most large-scale populations employ a punitive judicial system where a third party doles out punishment. Yet, there's little evidence that this system achieves cooperation in a community. Advocates have long called for a more restorative justice system that repairs harm done to victims and reintegrates wrongdoers back into society. From an evolutionary perspective, humans have developed capacities to resolve disputes through restoration such as language, empathy and causal reasoning, and theory of mind to understand others and their perspectives.