Abstract
The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled “universal structure of human morality” or “pure aversion to social betrayal”. Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous.
Highlights
Social norms are key to human cooperative interactions [1,2]
We evaluated the universal character of people’s propensity to punish social betrayal by examining three categories of participants with similar cultural backgrounds
Future teachers punished the most talented violinist according to her past social misconduct, with 37% less votes for her when she was described as immoral
Summary
When efficiently enforced by punishment, they usually help to restrain free-riding behaviour in large groups of unrelated individuals [2,3,4,5,6]–but see [7,8]. It is not clear what factors drive people to punish norm violators. There are various types of motivations for punishing social norm violators, such as the drive to increase personal reputation in a social context [9,10] or the urge to retaliate after having been victim of anti-social behaviour [11].
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