Altruistic Punishment Research Articles

It's costly punishment, not altruistic: Low midfrontal theta and state anger predict punishment.

Punishment in economic games has been interpreted as "altruistic." However, it was shown that punishment is related to trait anger instead of trait altruism in a third-party dictator game if compensation is also available. Here, we investigated the influence of state anger on punishment and compensation in the third-party dictator game. Therefore, we used movie sequences for emotional priming, including the target states anger, happy, and neutral. We measured the Feedback-Related Negativity (FRN) and midfrontal theta band activation, to investigate an electro-cortical correlate of the processing of fair and unfair offers. Also, we assessed single-trial FRN and midfrontal theta band activation as a predictor for punishment and compensation. We found that punishment was linked to state anger. Midfrontal theta band activation, which has previously been linked to altruistic acts and cognitive control, predicted less punishment. Additionally, trait anger led to enhanced FRN for unfair offers. This led to the interpretation that the FRN depicts the evaluation of fairness, while midfrontal theta band activation captures an aspect of cognitive control and altruistic motivation. We conclude that we need to redefine "altruistic punishment" into "costly punishment," as no direct link of altruism and punishment is given. Additionally, midfrontal theta band activation complements the FRN and offers additional insights into complex responses and decision processes, especially as a single trial predictor.

Punishing the individual or the group for norm violation.

Background: It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. Methods: In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Results: Participants made lower offers when making their decision as part of a group as compared to alone. This difference correlated with participants' overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower when punishing vs not punishing an unfair offer. Importantly here, they were slower when deciding whether to punish or not to punish groups as compared to individuals, only when the offer concerned them directly in second party punishment. Participants thus take more time to punish others, and to make their mind on whether to punish or not when facing a group of proposers. Conclusions: Together, these results show that people behave differently in a group, both in their willingness to share with others and in their punishment of norm violations. This could be explained by the fact that being in a collective structure allows to share responsibility with others, thereby protecting from negative consequences of norm violations.

Punishing the individual or the group for norm violation

Background: It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. Methods: In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Results: Participants made lower offers when making their decision as part of a group as compared to alone. This difference correlated with participants’ overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower when punishing vs not punishing an unfair offer. Importantly here, they were slower when deciding whether to punish or not to punish groups as compared to individuals, only when the offer concerned them directly in second party punishment. Participants thus take more time to punish others, and to make their mind on whether to punish or not when facing a group of proposers. Conclusions: Together, these results show that people behave differently in a group, both in their willingness to share with others and in their punishment of norm violations. This could be explained by the fact that being in a collective structure allows to share responsibility with others, thereby protecting from negative consequences of norm violations.

The Evaluation of Second- and Third-Party Punishers

Although punishment can promote cooperative behavior, the evolution of punishment requires benefits which override the cost. One possible source of the benefit of punishing uncooperative behavior is obtaining a positive evaluation. This study compares evaluations of punishers and non-punishers. Two hundred and thirty-four undergraduate students participated in two studies. Study 1 revealed that, in the public goods game, punishers were not positively evaluated, while punishers were positively evaluated in the third-party punishment game. In Study 2, where the non-cooperator was a participant of a public goods game, we manipulated the punishers participation in the game. The results showed that punishers received no positive evaluations, regardless of their participation in the game, indicating that negative evaluation may not be a reaction toward aggression with retaliatory intentions.

人情压力和惩罚代价对第三方惩罚的影响——社会距离的调节效应

人情压力和惩罚代价对第三方惩罚的影响——社会距离的调节效应

Young children police group members at personal cost.

Humans' evolutionary success has depended in part on their willingness to punish, at personal cost, bad actors who have not harmed them directly-a behavior known as costly third-party punishment. The present studies examined the psychological processes underlying this behavior from a developmental perspective, using a novel, naturalistic method. In these studies (ages 3-6, total N = 225), participants of all ages enacted costly punishment, and rates of punishment increased with age. In addition, younger children (ages 3-4), when in a position of authority, were more likely to punish members of their own group, whereas older children (ages 5-6) showed no group- or authority-based differences. These findings demonstrate the developmental emergence of costly punishment, and show how a sense of authority can foster the kind of group-regulatory behavior that costly punishment may have evolved to serve. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Psychological and Sociological Factors Weakening Public Budget Awareness

Public budget, which is the total of the expenditures made to meet the common needs of the society and of the revenues obtained to finance these expenditures can be expressed with a “common wallet” metaphor. However, the main problem is, in case that public resources are not used correctly and effectively, why citizens do not show as much sensitivity towards their common wallets, as they show towards their personal wallets. It is important to examine the factors that weaken public budget awareness (common wallet perception) on the basis of behavioral economics, which is an area that observes the effects of people's attitudes, behaviors and thoughts on economic-based choices and decisions and examines these observations based on experiments. For this reason, the main purpose of our study has been to bring some concepts used in the fields of psychology and sociology in the field of public finance. In this study, the "fiscal alienation" concept was derived from the concept of lack of social belonging, “lack of fiscal altruistic punishment" concept from the concept of altruistic punishment, "fiscal bystander effect" from the concept of the bystander effect, "fiscal social loafing" concept from the concept of social loafing, "behavioral fiscal dissonance" concept from the concept of the theory of cognitive dissonance, and "the problem of fiscal ethic" concept from the concept of undeveloped ethical culture/behaviors.

Distinguishing punishing costly signals from nonpunishing costly signals can facilitate the emergence of altruistic punishment

Altruistic punishment is regarded as a solution for the social dilemma, yet the fact that altruistic punishment itself is a type of public good raises the second-order social dilemma. Previous studies have typically explained the emergence of altruistic punishment by recouping punishers with other public goods or altruistic behaviors, but introducing new public goods would then raise the n-order social dilemma. Costly signaling theory (CST), by viewing public goods as costly signaling, is a potential approach to explain the evolution of cooperation without introducing other public goods because partnering altruistic signalers is not necessarily an altruistic behavior. However, previous studies based on CST have rarely distinguished altruistic punishment as the distinctive costly signal from a nonpunishing contribution. In this study, we explore the rules of transforming payoffs into fitness by differentiating punishing costly signals from nonpunishing costly signals. The results show that, under the condition that the efficacy of costly signaling is incomplete, altruistic punishment can only emerge in the population with transforming rules in which individuals regard altruistic punishment as a distinctive costly signal rather than a nonpunishing contribution.

Probabilistic punishment and reward under rule of trust-based decision-making in continuous public goods game

Altruistic punishment and reward have been proved to promote the evolution of cooperation in the public goods game(PGG), but the punishers and the rewarders have to pay a price for these behaviors and that results in overall loss of interest. In present work, probabilistic punishment and reward are introduced to PGG. Probabilistic punishment and reward mean that punishment and reward are executed with a certain probability. Although that will reduce unnecessary costs, occasional absence of execution can lead to distrust. Thus we focus on how to implement punishment and reward efficiently within the structured populations. Numerical simulations are performed and prove that probabilistic punishment and reward can promote the evolution of cooperation more effectively. Further researches indicate that there is an optimal executing probability to promote cooperation and maximize reduction of cost. In addition, when the unit cost is high, the PGG with probabilistic punishment and reward still helps the evolution of altruistic punishers and rewarders, thereby avoiding collapse of cooperation.

Cooperative networks with robust private monitoring

Social networks support cooperative behavior in a variety of social and economic settings. We study cooperative networks that can be formed when payoff and information asymmetries imply that cooperation relies on unverifiable third-party punishments. Under private monitoring, equilibrium predictions can depend on players' beliefs about unobservable behavior, and our results identify the range of equilibrium network outcomes. In particular, when strategies must be robust to beliefs, we show that network structures satisfy a triadic closure property, providing a strategic rationale for the short paths and high clustering observed in many social and economic networks. We illustrate some of the substantive restrictions identified in our results for risk- and information-sharing networks.

The benefit of the doubt: willful ignorance and altruistic punishment

Altruistic punishment is often thought to be a major enforcement mechanism of social norms. I present experimental results from a modified version of the dictator game with third-party punishment, in which third parties can remain ignorant about the choice of the dictator. I find that a substantial fraction of subjects choose not to reveal the dictator’s choice and not to punish the dictator. I show that this behavior is in line with the social norms that prevail in a situation of initial ignorance. Remaining ignorant and choosing not to punish is not inappropriate. As a result, altruistic punishment is significantly lower when the dictator’s choice is initially hidden. The decrease in altruistic punishment leads to more selfish dictator behavior only if dictators are explicitly informed about the effect of willful ignorance on punishment rates. Hence, in scenarios in which third parties can ignore information and dictators know what this implies, third-party punishment may only ineffectively enforce social norms.

Modulating Activity in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex Changes Punishment in the 3-Player Prisoner's Dilemma: A Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation Study.

Altruistic punishment of social norm violations plays a crucial role in maintaining widespread cooperation in human societies, and punitive behavior has been suggested to be related to the activity level of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). This study used unilateral and bilateral transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to investigate how modulating the activity of the DLPFC affects cooperation and punishment in a 3-player prisoner’s dilemma. We found that none of the unilateral stimulations changed the participants’ cooperation behaviors, while left anodal/right cathodal stimulation increased the participants’ cooperation. For punitive behavior, we found that all unilateral stimulations (i.e., right anodal, right cathodal, left anodal, left cathodal) and bilateral stimulations (i.e., right anodal/left cathodal, left anodal/right cathodal) significantly decreased the punishment imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors. In addition, right anodal stimulation significantly decreased the participant’s third-party punishment (TPP) imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors. The other three unilateral stimulations also significantly decreased the participant’s TPP imposed by the cooperators toward the defectors, but only when the punishment was revealed to the punished person. Our findings indicate that the mechanisms of selfishness and negative emotions suggested by previous studies probably interact with different stimulations: for anodal stimulations, the mechanism of negative emotions may overwhelm the mechanism of selfishness, while for cathodal stimulations, the mechanism of selfishness may be more dominant than the mechanism of negative emotions.

Call for Papers: “What Drives Second- and Third-Party Punishment? Conceptual Replications of the ‘Intuitive Retributivism’ Hypothesis”

Call for Papers: “What Drives Second- and Third-Party Punishment? Conceptual Replications of the ‘Intuitive Retributivism’ Hypothesis”

The Role of the Temporoparietal and Prefrontal Cortices in a Third-Party Punishment: A tDCS Study

The Role of the Temporoparietal and Prefrontal Cortices in a Third-Party Punishment: A tDCS Study

Punishing the individual or the group for norm violation.

Background: It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. Methods: In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Results: Participants made lower offers when making a collective rather than an individual decision. This difference correlated with participants' overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower when punishing vs not punishing an unfair offer. Importantly here, they were slower when deciding whether to punish groups as compared to individuals, only when the offer concerned them directly in second party punishment. Participants thus seem reluctant to punish others, and even more so when facing a group of proposers. Conclusions: Together, these results show that people behave differently in a group, both in their willingness to share with others and in their punishment of norm violations. This could be explained by the fact that being in a collective structure allows to share responsibility with others, thereby protecting from negative consequences of norm violations.

Brain responses to social punishment: a meta-analysis

Many studies suggest that social punishment is beneficial for cooperation and consequently maintaining the social norms in society. Neuroimaging and brain stimulation studies show that the brain regions which respond to violations of social norms, the understanding of the mind of others and the executive functions, are involved during social punishment. Despite the rising number of studies on social punishment, the concordant map of activations - the set of key regions responsible for the general brain response to social punishment - is still unknown. By using coordinate-based fMRI meta-analysis, the present study examined the concordant map of neural activations associated with various social punishment tasks. A total of 17 articles with 18 contrasts including 383 participants, equalling 191 foci were included in activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis. The majority of the studies (61%) employed the widely used neuroeconomic paradigms, such as fairness-related norm tasks (Ultimatum Game, third-party punishment game), while the remaining tasks reported criminal scenarios evaluation and social rejection tasks. The analysis revealed concordant activation in the bilateral claustrum, right interior frontal and left superior frontal gyri. This study provides an integrative view on brain responses to social punishment.

To help or punish in the face of unfairness: men and women prefer mutually-beneficial strategies over punishment in a sexual selection context.

Consistent with a sexual selection account of cooperation, based on female choice, men, in romantic contexts, in general display mutually-beneficial behaviour and women choose men who do so. This evidence is based on a two-choice-architecture (cooperate or not). Here we extend this to include punishment options using a four-choice-architecture (‘punishing a transgressor’, ‘compensating a victim’, ‘both punishing and compensating’ or ‘doing nothing’). Both compensation (a self-serving mutually-beneficial behaviour) and self-serving punishment, are associated with positive mate qualities. We test which is preferred by males and chosen by female undergraduates. We further explore effects of trait empathy and political ideology on these preferences. In a series of three studies using a third-party punishment and compensation (3PPC) game we show (Study One), that romantically-primed undergraduate males, express a preference to either ‘compensate’ or ‘both compensate and punish’, and undergraduate women find males who ‘compensate’ or ‘compensate and punish’ the most attractive (Studies Two and Three). Compensating men are perceived as compassionate, fair and strong by undergraduate women (Study Three). High trait empathy (Studies One and Three) and a left-wing political ideology (Study Three) are associated with a preference for compensation. Thus, self-serving mutually-beneficial behaviour can be preferred over self-serving punishment as a signal of mate quality in undergraduates. Implications for the evolution of cooperation are discussed with respect to sexual selection.

Infants expect leaders to right wrongs

Anthropological and psychological research on direct third-party punishment suggests that adults expect the leaders of social groups to intervene in within-group transgressions. Here, we explored the developmental roots of this expectation. In violation-of-expectation experiments, we asked whether 17-mo-old infants (n = 120) would expect a leader to intervene when observing a within-group fairness transgression but would hold no particular expectation for intervention when a nonleader observed the same transgression. Infants watched a group of 3 bear puppets who served as the protagonist, wrongdoer, and victim. The protagonist brought in 2 toys for the other bears to share, but the wrongdoer seized both toys, leaving none for the victim. The protagonist then either took 1 toy away from the wrongdoer and gave it to the victim (intervention event) or approached each bear in turn without redistributing a toy (nonintervention event). Across conditions, the protagonist was either a leader (leader condition) or a nonleader equal in rank to the other bears (nonleader condition); across experiments, leadership was marked by either behavioral or physical cues. In both experiments, infants in the leader condition looked significantly longer if shown the nonintervention as opposed to the intervention event, suggesting that they expected the leader to intervene and rectify the wrongdoer's transgression. In contrast, infants in the nonleader condition looked equally at the events, suggesting that they held no particular expectation for intervention from the nonleader. By the second year of life, infants thus already ascribe unique responsibilities to leaders, including that of righting wrongs.

Compassion magnifies third-party punishment.

The last decades of research have provided overwhelming evidence that compassion fosters a vast range of behaviors toward reducing suffering of others. In this regard, compassion has been described as a prosocial tendency par excellence, fostering helping behavior across a variety of social situations. With the present contribution, we apply a differentiated perspective on compassion. Building on just deserts theory, we argue that when other individuals suffer from unjust actions, compassion for the suffering individuals can foster harmful tendencies toward those who caused the suffering (i.e., third-party punishment). In Studies 1a to 1f, we examined a rich variety of situations in which unjust suffering occurs (i.e., terrorist attacks, sexual assaults, rape of children, and war) and documented a positive relation between compassion for suffering victims and punishment inclinations toward those who caused the suffering. Applying an experimental approach using various paradigms in Studies 2 through 6, compassion was shown to increase third-party punishment. Additional analyses revealed that (a) this increase occurs because compassion intensified moral outrage, which in turn predicted third-party punishment (Studies 2 to 6), and (b) compassion only fosters third-party punishment when suffering was caused by high (vs. low) unjust acts (Study 5). Overall, the present research discusses compassion in a different light in that harmful consequences of compassion are considered. Implications are discussed from a perspective of basic research on compassion and third-party punishment as well as from a societal perspective. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex and temporo-parietal junction in third-party punishment behavior

Third parties punish, sacrificing personal interests, offenders who violate either fairness or cooperation norms. This behavior is defined altruistic punishment and the degree of punishment typically increases with the severity of the norm violation. An opposite and apparently paradoxical behavior, namely anti-social punishment, is the tendency to spend own money to punish cooperative or fair behaviors. Previous fMRI studies correlated punishment behavior with increased activation of brain areas belonging to the reward system (e.g. the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, VMPFC), the mentalizing (e.g. the temporoparietal junction, TPJ) and central-executive networks. In the present study, we aimed at investigating the causal role of VMPFC and TPJ in punishment behaviors through the application of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS).Sixty healthy participants were randomly assigned to three tDCS conditions: (1) anodal tDCS over VMPFC, (2) anodal tDCS over right TPJ (rTPJ), (3) sham stimulation. At the end of the stimulation, participants played a third-party punishment game, consisting in viewing a series of fair or unfair monetary allocations between unknown proposers and recipients. Participants were asked whether and how much they would punish the proposers using their own monetary endowment. To test membership effects, proposers and recipients could be either Italian or Chinese.Anodal tDCS over VMPFC increased altruistic punishment behavior whereas anodal tDCS over rTPJ increased anti-social punishment choices compared with sham condition, while membership did not influence participant's choices. Our results support the idea that the two types of punishment behaviors rely upon different brain regions, suggesting that reward and mentalizing systems underlie, respectively, altruistic and anti-social punishment behaviors.