Abstract
The aim of the current study was threefold: (i) understand people’s willingness to engage in either punishment of the perpetrator or compensation of the victim in order to counteract injustice; (ii) look into the differences between victims of and witnesses to injustice; (iii) investigate the different role played by social preference and affective experience in determining these choices. The sample tested here showed an equal preference for punishment and compensation; neuroimaging findings suggested that compensation, as opposed to punishment, was related to Theory of Mind. Partially supporting previous literature, choosing how to react to an injustice as victims, rather than witnesses, triggered a stronger affective response (striatal and prefrontal activation). Moreover, results supported the idea that deciding whether or not to react to an injustice and then how severely to react are two distinct decisional stages underpinned by different neurocognitive mechanisms, i.e., sensitivity to unfairness (anterior insula) and negative affectivity (amygdala). These findings provide a fine-grained description of the psychological mechanisms underlying important aspects of social norm compliance.
Highlights
Norms such as fairness and cooperation are fundamental principles of society, and in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in investigations of the psychological underpinnings of these social norms
Four participants never reacted to injustice and always chose to Leave; one participant never reacted in the Third Party (TP) condition, and two never reacted in the Second Party (SP) condition; four participants never punished, neither in SP nor in TP, but did compensate; two participants never punished in TP, but did compensate; three participants never compensated, but did punish in TP
Analyses were performed www.nature.com/scientificreports punishment, Third Party (TP) punishment, TP compensation) and Injustice level represented in terms of amount of chips owned by both players A and B after player A’s decision (0 chips taken, or 200:200 = fair division; 100 chips taken, or 300:100 = extremely unfair division); (c,d) frequencies and amounts for each Task (SPpun; Third Party punishment (TPpun); Third Party compensation (TPcomp)) for unfair trials
Summary
Norms such as fairness and cooperation are fundamental principles of society, and in recent years there has been a dramatic increase in investigations of the psychological underpinnings of these social norms. An alternative approach to emphasizing cooperative norms is that of compensating the victims of injustice, where fairness can be re-established by assisting the victim, offering aid to increase their depleted resources even though this aid comes at a personal cost[6,7,8,9,10,11] Both of these approaches are reactions to a social transgression, these strategies differ substantially in terms of output: punishment discourages social norm violation by harming offenders and leaving them worse off, whereas compensation focuses on victims, signalling altruism and prosociality[12]. We hypothesised that reward areas were associated with a preference for punishment, whereas ToM areas were associated with a preference for compensation
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