Altruistic Punishment Research Articles

Commentary: The Emerging Neuroscience of Third-Party Punishment.

Commentary: The Emerging Neuroscience of Third-Party Punishment.

Altruistic Punishment: A Consumer Response to Service Failure

Despite the efforts of organizations to perform their services properly, being able to eliminate all possible errors is highly improbable. When service failures occur, they tend to involve some level of social conflict, which in theory can lead to altruistic punishment; however, such behaviors have yet to be explored in relation to such a scenario. This study investigates altruistic punishment from consumers in contexts of service recovery. Two experiments were conducted by adapting the structure of the Ultimatum Game to consumer situations. It was possible to identify altruistic punishment through perceptions of injustice in the form of a rejection of a company’s proposal for recovery combined with retaliation. From the findings, it is evident that attention to altruistic punishment in a consumption scenario is advisable, as its occurrence is costly for consumers and businesses.

How humans cooperate and punish.

Many studies have shown that human cooperation is fostered by altruistic cooperation and the altruistic punishment of freeriders. A study now shows significant asymmetries between cooperation in the initial provision of a social good and cooperation in the maintenance of an established social good.

Oxytocin promotes altruistic punishment.

The role of neuromodulators in the enforcement of cooperation is still not well understood. Here, we provide evidence that intranasal applied oxytocin, an important hormone for modulating social behavior, enhances the inclination to sanction free-riders in a social dilemma situation. Contrary to the notion of oxytocin being a pro-social hormone, we found that participants treated with oxytocin exhibited an amplification of self-reported negative social emotions such as anger towards free-riders, ultimately resulting in higher magnitude and frequency of punishment of free-riders compared to placebo. Furthermore, we found initial evidence that oxytocin contributes to the positive effects of a punishment institution by rendering cooperation preferable in the oxytocin condition for even the most selfish players when punishment was available. Together, these findings imply that the neural circuits underlying altruistic punishment are partly targeted by the oxytonergic system and highlight the importance of neuromodulators in group cohesion and norm enforcement within social groups.

Foundations of Costly Signaling: Individuals Who Benefit More from Trustworthiness in Daily Life Find Third-Party Punishment Less Costly

Foundations of Costly Signaling: Individuals Who Benefit More from Trustworthiness in Daily Life Find Third-Party Punishment Less Costly

Altruistic punishment in elections

Altruistic punishment is a fundamental driver for cooperation in human interactions. In this paper, we expand our understanding of this form of pro-social behavior to help explain a puzzle of voting: why do individuals who are indifferent between two potential policy outcomes of an election participate when voting is costly? Using a simple voting experiment, we provide robust evidence that many voters are willing to engage in voting as a form of punishment, even when voting is costly and the voter has no monetary stake in the election outcome. In our sample, and in a robustness check through Monte Carlo simulation, we show that at least fourteen percent of individuals are willing to incur a cost to vote against candidates who broke their electoral promises, even when they have no pecuniary interest in the election outcome.

Is morality hardwired into the brain? The recent advances and prospects of cognitive neural mechanism researches of morality

“Is morality hardwired into the brain” is a major problem that have long puzzled philosophers. Since Piaget and Kohlberg, morality gradually comes into the view of psychological research. In the 21st century, morality has become a new growing point of cognitive neuroscience research and moral cognitive neuroscience has emerged. Current moral cognitive neuroscience studies give a preliminary answer to the above puzzle. These studies focus on three aspects: the brain mechanism of moral judgment, the brain mechanism of moral emotion and the integrative brain mechanism models of morality. Moral judgement is a process of individuals’ moral evaluation of their own or others’ behavior according moral principles which is the interaction of cognition and emotion. Therefore, the brain regions of moral judgment not only consist of some brain areas related to cognitive process which include DLPFC, ATL and TPJ, but also involve some brain areas related to emotional process which include VMPFC, OFC, ACC and amygdala. Moral emotions are some complex emotions which arise from moral evaluation of one’s own of others’ behavior and affect the occurrence and change of moral behavior, such as empathy, guilt and admiration, etc. Many studies show that the main brain areas of cognitive empathy are VMPFC and TPJ, and the core brain areas of emotional empathy include ACC, AI and mirror-neuron system. On the one hand, positive empathy has some same brain mechanism with negative empathy, for instance, both of them can activate left AI. On the other hand, there are certain cognitive neuroscience difference between positive empathy and negative empathy. Positive empathy activates the brain reward system, but negative empathy activate the right AI. The brain areas of guilt are mainly in VMPFC, precuneus, TP, ACC and insula. Admiration for virtue can activate posterior PMC, ACC, anterior insula, hypothalamus and folia cerebelli. The main integrative brain mechanism models of morality are dual-process theory of moral judgment, Event-Feature-Emotion Complexes, Triune Brain Theory, and brain mechanism models of cooperation and altruistic punishment. In the point view of dual-process theory of moral judgment, moral judgement which is related to explicit cognitive reasoning process and implicit emotional motivation process needs comprehensive function of VMPFC, PCC, precuneus, amygdala, ACC, inferior parietal cortex and DLPFC. The main components of Event-Feature-Emotion Complexes are structured event knowledge, social perception and functional features, and central motive states. According to Triune Brain Theory, the neural bases of safety ethic, engagement ethic and imagination ethic are reptilian brain, paleomammalian brain and eomammalian brain respectively. Cooperative decision-making is based on the interaction of reward system, cognitive control system and social cognition system. The brain mechanism model of altruistic punishment includes three system: reward, cognition and emotional regulation. Future researches should integrate the existing research results, improve ecological validity gradually, use many methods synthetically, and rich and expand research perspectives.

Neural substrates of context- and person-dependent altruistic punishment.

Human altruistic behaviors are heterogeneous across both contexts and people, whereas the neural signatures underlying the heterogeneity remain to be elucidated. To address this issue, we examined the neural signatures underlying the context- and person-dependent altruistic punishment, conjoining event-related fMRI with both task-based and resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC). Acting as an impartial third party, participants decided how to punish norm violators either alone or in the presence of putative others. We found that the presence of others decreased altruistic punishment due to diffusion of responsibility. Those behavioral effects paralleled altered neural responses in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and putamen. Further, we identified modulation of responsibility diffusion on task-based functional connectivity of dACC with the brain regions implicated in reward processing (i.e., posterior cingulate cortex and amygdala/orbital frontal cortex). Finally, the RSFC results revealed that (i) increased intrinsic connectivity strengths of the putamen with temporoparietal junction and dorsolateral PFC were associated with attenuated responsibility diffusion in altruistic punishment and (ii) increased putamen-dorsomedial PFC connectivity strengths were associated with reduced responsibility diffusion in self-reported responsibility. Taken together, our findings elucidate the context- and person-dependent altruistic behaviors as well as associated neural substrates and thus provide a potential neurocognitive mechanism of heterogeneous human altruistic behaviors. Hum Brain Mapp 38:5535-5550, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The psychology of deterrence explains why group membership matters for third-party punishment

Abstract Humans regularly intervene in others' conflicts as third-parties. This has been studied using the third-party punishment game: A third-party can pay a cost to punish another player (the dictator) who treated someone else poorly. Because the game is anonymous and one-shot, punishers are thought to have no strategic reasons to intervene. Nonetheless, punishers often punish dictators who treat others poorly. This result is central to a controversy over human social evolution: Did third-party punishment evolve to maintain group norms or to deter others from acting against one's interests? This paper provides a critical test. We manipulate the ingroup/outgroup composition of the players while simultaneously measuring the inferences punishers make about how the dictator would treat them personally. The group norm predictions were falsified, as outgroup defectors were punished most harshly, not ingroup defectors (as predicted by ingroup fairness norms) and not outgroup members generally (as predicted by norms of parochialism). The deterrence predictions were validated: Punishers punished the most when they inferred that they would be treated the worst by dictators, especially when better treatment would be expected given ingroup/outgroup composition.

Social influence on third-party punishment: An experiment

We study the effect of social influence on agents’ decisions to engage in costly decentralized third-party punishment. In a laboratory experiment, participants play a modified Dictator game with third-party punishment and we elicit punishment decisions both in isolation and after providing information about peers’ average punishment. Results show that social influence is a major driver of third-party punishment: after receiving information on peers’ average punishment, participants revise initial punishment choices and seek conformity. Social influence effects are stronger when peers punished more than the individual punisher and conformity implies revising punishment upward. Adding to the information on peers’ punishment the possibility for other participants to sanction or reward with an emoticon the choices of the individual punisher does not change results. Our findings contrast with the predictions of major theories of social preferences and are only explained by special cases of models incorporating aversion to norm-breaking.

Commentary: Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

Commentary: Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

Politeness and Compassion Differentially Predict Adherence to Fairness Norms and Interventions to Norm Violations in Economic Games

Adherence to norms and interventions to norm violations are two important forms of social behaviour modelled in economic games. While both appear to serve a prosocial function, they may represent separate mechanisms corresponding with distinct emotional and psychological antecedents, and thus may be predicted by different personality traits. In this study, we compared adherence to fairness norms in the dictator game with responses to violations of the same norms in third-party punishment and recompensation games with respect to prosocial traits from the Big Five and HEXACO models of personality. The results revealed a pattern of differential relations between prosocial traits and game behaviours. While norm adherence in the dictator game was driven by traits reflecting good manners and non-aggression (the politeness aspect of Big Five agreeableness and HEXACO honesty-humility), third-party recompensation of victims—and to a lesser extent, punishment of offenders—was uniquely driven by traits reflecting emotional concern for others (the compassion aspect of Big Five agreeableness). These findings demonstrate the discriminant validity between similar prosocial constructs and highlight the different prosocial motivations underlying economic game behaviours.

Genetic variation of dopamine and serotonin function modulates the feedback-related negativity during altruistic punishment

Why do humans cooperate and often punish norm violations of others? In the present study, we sought to investigate the genetic bases of altruistic punishment (AP), which refers to the costly punishment of norm violations with potential benefit for other individuals. Recent evidence suggests that norm violations and unfairness are indexed by the feedback-related negativity (FRN), an anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) generated neural response to expectancy violations. Given evidence on the role of serotonin and dopamine in AP as well as in FRN-generation, we explored the impact of genetic variation of serotonin and dopamine function on FRN and AP behavior in response to unfair vs. fair monetary offers in a Dictator Game (DG) with punishment option. In a sample of 45 healthy participants we observed larger FRN amplitudes to unfair DG assignments both for 7-repeat allele carriers of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) exon III polymorphism and for l/l-genotype carriers of the serotonin transporter gene-linked polymorphic region (5-HTTLRP). Moreover, 5-HTTLPR l/l-genotype carriers punished unfair offers more strongly. These findings support the role of serotonin and dopamine in AP, potentially via their influence on neural mechanisms implicated in the monitoring of expectancy violations and their relation to impulsive and punishment behavior.

The evolution of private governance: Neither anarchism nor Statism

I read E. P. Stringham’s book on private governance against the background of Morris Hoffman’s account of the evolution of legal punishment. This allows us to see how the evolution of private governance moves through three levels of punishment: the first-party punishment of conscience and guilt, the second-party punishment of retaliation and revenge, and the third-party punishment of retribution. This suggests that neither pure anarchism nor pure statism is possible, because every social order shows some form of governance, and no authoritarian state can ever hold an absolute monopoly on governance to the exclusion of private governance. One can also see that liberal states leave lots of room for private governance, which allows for adaptive flexibility in solving public problems in ways that promote peace and prosperity.

Third-party punishment as a costly signal of high continuation probabilities in repeated games

Why do individuals pay costs to punish selfish behavior, even as third-party observers? A large body of research suggests that reputation plays an important role in motivating such third-party punishment (TPP). Here we focus on a recently proposed reputation-based account (Jordan et al., 2016) that invokes costly signaling. This account proposed that “trustworthy type” individuals (who are incentivized to cooperate with others) typically experience lower costs of TPP, and thus that TPP can function as a costly signal of trustworthiness. Specifically, it was argued that some but not all individuals face incentives to cooperate, making them high-quality and trustworthy interaction partners; and, because the same mechanisms that incentivize cooperation also create benefits for using TPP to deter selfish behavior, these individuals are likely to experience reduced costs of punishing selfishness. Here, we extend this conceptual framework by providing a concrete, “from-the-ground-up” model demonstrating how this process could work in the context of repeated interactions incentivizing both cooperation and punishment. We show how individual differences in the probability of future interaction can create types that vary in whether they find cooperation payoff-maximizing (and thus make high-quality partners), as well as in their net costs of TPP – because a higher continuation probability increases the likelihood of receiving rewards from the victim of the punished transgression (thus offsetting the cost of punishing). We also provide a simple model of dispersal that demonstrates how types that vary in their continuation probabilities can stably coexist, because the payoff from remaining in one’s local environment (i.e. not dispersing) decreases with the number of others who stay. Together, this model demonstrates, from the group up, how TPP can serve as a costly signal of trustworthiness arising from exposure to repeated interactions.

Punishment in the form of shared cost promotes altruism in the cooperative dilemma games

One phenomenon or social institution often observed in multi-agent interactions is the altruistic punishment, i.e. the punishment of unfair behavior by others at a personal cost. Inspired by the works focusing on punishment and the intricate mechanism behind it, we theoretically study the strategy evolution in the framework of two-strategy game models with the punishment on defectors, moreover, the cost of punishing will be evenly shared among the cooperators. Theoretical computations suggest that larger punishment on defectors or smaller punishment cost incurred by cooperators will enhance the fixation of altruistic cooperation in the population. Through the replicate dynamics, the group size of the randomly selected individuals from the sufficiently large population will notably affect the strategy evolution in populations nested within a dilemma. By theoretical modeling the concept of shared cost for punishment from one point of view, our findings underscore the importance of punishment with shared cost as a factor in real-life decisions in an evolutionary game context.

From good institutions to generous citizens: Top-down incentives to cooperate promote subsequent prosociality but not norm enforcement

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), American participants who reported living under higher quality cooperation-enforcing institutions (police and courts) gave significantly more in a Dictator Game (DG), but did not punish significantly more in a Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG). In Study 1R (N=1705), we replicated the positive relationship between reported institutional quality and DG giving observed in Study 1. In Study 2 (N=516), we experimentally manipulated institutional quality in a repeated Public Goods Game with a centralized punishment institution. Consistent with the correlational results of Study 1 and 1R, we found that centralized punishment led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent DG compared to a no-punishment control, but had no significant direct effect on subsequent TPPG punishment (only an indirect effect via increased DG giving). Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to “spills over” to subsequent prosociality but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation.

Identifying behavioral norms among bicyclists in mixed-traffic conditions

This study examines the presence of behavioral norms while riding a bicycle in mixed-traffic conditions. We assess car and bicycle on-street interactions by asking bicyclists to consider how they would respond when driving a car and encountering a bicyclist behaving in ways that might be perceived as reckless, rude, and/or illegal. We hypothesize that individuals have preconceived notions of what constitutes appropriate bicycling established, in part, by their own experiences as bicyclists. These experiences as bicyclists themselves inform what they deem acceptable behavioral norms by other bicyclists, and in turn, the nature of their response (e.g. aggressive or benevolent) towards other bicyclists.We use data drawn from an online survey that posed hypothetical, mixed-traffic scenarios to those that bicycle and also drive. Reactions to various scenarios are operationalized as dependent variables in logistic regression models. Independent variables include socio-demographic factors, general perceptions of bicycling, and measures of specific bicycling behaviors. Regression results indicate that as an individual’s own bicycling experience increases, their likelihood of an aggressive response to bicyclists in a mixed-traffic encounter is reduced. Additionally, we find that increasingly aggressive responses to other bicyclists may be evidence of altruistic punishment, wherein bicyclists ascribe and seek to enforce their own behavioral norms regarding appropriate bicycling behavior in mixed traffic. Such norms, however, reflect personal experience rather than existing traffic laws. Multi-modal education, infrastructure, and revised traffic laws are needed to clearly ascribe appropriate travel behavior by all modes and facilitate safe, efficient, multi-modal interactions.

From Good Institutions to Good Norms: Top-Down Incentives to Cooperate Foster Prosociality But Not Norm Enforcement

What makes people willing to pay costs to help others, and to punish others’ selfishness? Why does the extent of such behaviors vary markedly across cultures? To shed light on these questions, we explore the role of formal institutions in shaping individuals’ prosociality and punishment. In Study 1 (N=707), we found that the quality of institutions enforcing cooperativeness (police and courts) that participants reported being exposed to in daily life was positively associated with Dictator Game (DG) giving, but had little relationship with punishment in a Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG). In Study 2 (N=516), we experimentally manipulated institutional quality in a repeated Public Goods Game with a centralized punishment institution. Consistent with Study 1’s correlational results, we found that centralized punishment led to significantly more prosociality in a subsequent DG compared to a no-punishment control, but had no significant direct effect on subsequent TPPG punishment (only an indirect effect via increased DG giving). Thus we present convergent evidence that the quality of institutions one is exposed to “spills over” to subsequent prosociality but not punishment. These findings support a theory of social heuristics, suggest boundary conditions on spillover effects of cooperation, and demonstrate the power of effective institutions for instilling habits of virtue and creating cultures of cooperation.

Altruistic Norm Enforcement and Decision-Making Format in a Dilemma: Experimental Evidence

Past research has shown that people often take punitive actions towards norm violators even when they are not directly involved in transactions. However, it at the same time suggests that such third-party punishment may not be strong enough to enforce cooperation norms in dilemma situations. This paper experimentally compares the effectiveness of third-party punishment between different enforcement formats. Consistent with past studies, our data shows that having an individual third-party punisher in a group does not make one’s defection materially unbeneficial because of the weak punishment intensity. It also shows that third-party punishment is not effective when two individuals form a pair as a punisher and jointly decide how strong third-party punishment they impose. However, third-party punishment can be sufficiently strong to enforce cooperation norms when a third-party punisher’s action choice is made known to another individual third-party punisher in a different group, or when there are two independent individual third-party players in a group.