No Evidence for Moral Reward and Punishment in an Anonymous Context.

Christine Clavien,Danielle P Mersch,Michel Chapuisat

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0150388

Abstract

Human social interactions are regulated by moral norms that define individual obligations and rights. These norms are enforced by punishment of transgressors and reward of followers. Yet, the generality and strength of this drive to punish or reward is unclear, especially when people are not personally involved in the situation and when the actual impact of their sanction is only indirect, i.e., when it diminishes or promotes the social status of the punished or rewarded individual. In a real-life study, we investigated if people are inclined to anonymously punish or reward a person for her past deeds in a different social context. Participants from three socio-professional categories voted anonymously for early career violinists in an important violin competition. We found that participants did not punish an immoral violin candidate, nor did they reward another hyper-moral candidate. On the contrary, one socio-professional category sanctioned hyper-morality. Hence, salient moral information about past behavior did not elicit punishment or reward in an impersonal situation where the impact of the sanction was indirect. We conclude that contextual features play an important role in human motivation to enforce moral norms.

Highlights

Moral norms are ubiquitous in human societies
In our real-life experiment, we found no evidence for a propensity to punish immoral behavior or reward hyper-moral conduct in an anonymous impersonal context
The participants–future teachers, future police officers and high school students–believed that their anonymous vote would impact the career of violinist candidates in a music competition, granting the winner with fame and an increase in social status

Summary

Introduction

Moral norms are ubiquitous in human societies. They dictate individual obligations and rights in a variety of domains related to harm, care, fairness, reciprocity, loyalty, respect for authority or purity [1]. Many studies on human morality assume that humans are intrinsically motivated–i.e. have some built-in inclinations–to enforce the moral norms they adhere to by punishing normtransgressors and rewarding norm-followers. We found that two socio-professional categories–high school and police–ignored the moral information when voting, while a third category–teacher–voted against the immoral candidate This result provided evidence against an unconditional inclination to punish immoral behavior and raised three questions. Recent data indicate that humans may be more inclined to enforce moral norms by rewarding moral behavior than by punishing immoral behavior [37,38]. We perform a novel series of experiments to examine if participants anonymously punish or reward the violinist for a past immoral or moral behavior that she performed in a different social context. These scenarios allow us to examine the extent to which unconditional moral sanctions or rewards are used in an impersonal anonymous situation

Participants

Ethics Statement

Procedure

Results

Discussion