Empathy-based tolerance towards poor norm violators in third-party punishment.

Abstract

Third-party punishment (TPP) plays an important role in fairness norm enforcement. This study investigated how the economic status of proposers could modulate third parties' behavioural and neural responses to unfairness. Participants played a TPP game as third parties deciding whether to punish proposers after observing the offers from proposers while behavioural and electroencephalogram (EEG) data were recorded. The proposers were of either high economic status or low economic status, and the recipients were middle class. The behavioural results indicated that participants reported decreased punishment for poor-proposed unfair offers compared to rich-proposed unfair offers, and this effect was stronger for highly unfair offers. Neurally, greater P200, a component involved in empathy processing, was observed in response to highly unfair offers (i.e. 90:10 and 80:20) proposed by the poor, suggesting that when the targets of severe punishments were poor proposers, participants showed greater empathy for poor norm violators in highly unfair trials. Taken together, these findings help to elucidate that the third-parties tend to tolerate the norm-violating behaviours conducted by the poor and provided further neuroscience evidence for the influence of economic status of proposers on TPP.