Humans show a rare tendency to punish norm-violators who have not harmed them directly-a behavior known as third-party punishment. Research has found that third-party punishment is subject to intergroup bias, whereby people punish members of the out-group more severely than the in-group. Although the prevalence of this behavior is well-documented, the psychological processes underlying it remain largely unexplored. Some work suggests that it stems from people's inherent predisposition to form alliances with in-group members and aggress against out-group members. This implies that people will show reflexive intergroup bias in third-party punishment, favoring in-group over out-group members especially when their capacity for deliberation is impaired. Here we test this hypothesis directly, examining whether intergroup bias in third-party punishment emerges from reflexive, as opposed to deliberative, components of moral cognition. In 3 experiments, utilizing a simulated economic game, we varied participants' group relationship to a transgressor, measured or manipulated the extent to which they relied on reflexive or deliberative judgment, and observed people's punishment decisions. Across group-membership manipulations (American football teams, nationalities, and baseball teams) and 2 assessments of reflexive judgment (response time and cognitive load), reflexive judgment heightened intergroup bias, suggesting that such bias in punishment is inherent to human moral cognition. We discuss the implications of these studies for theories of punishment, cooperation, social behavior, and legal practice. (PsycINFO Database Record

Current literature suggests that laypeople's punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for this may be that individuals tend to focus on salient cues while ignoring others when making a decision and critically, generally pay relatively little attention to secondary or long-term effects of their decision-making. This suggests that people's punishment goals may be subject to the information salient about the crime situation. Specifically, individuals may only pursue utilitarian goals with their punishment, if aspects related to such long-term consequences of punishment are salient (such as information about the offender or the broad circumstances surrounding the crime). To examine this, we manipulated the salience of different aspects in a scenario describing a crime. In two preregistered experiments, participants were asked to choose from (Experiment 1, N = 291) or rate the appropriateness of (Experiment 2, N = 366) different reactions to the crime; these reactions were pretested for the degree to which they served each of the punishment goals: retribution, special prevention, and general prevention. As hypothesized, we found that participants' punishment goals were associated with the salience of specific aspects of the scenario describing the crime situation. This extends on research suggesting that laypeople's punishment goals are malleable and may depend on the research design employed by a particular study.

I. (in press). Stockpiling during the COVID-19 pandemic as a real-life social dilemma: A person-situation perspective.

The outbreak of a global pandemic such as COVID-19 poses a challenge for societies across the world. Lacking both vaccination and medical treatment, the only way to combat the spread of a virus in its early stages are behavioral measures, particularly physical distancing behavior. The present work proposes three pillars of individuals’ engagement in physical distancing: anxiety, prosociality, and rule compliance. In a large (N = 1,504), pre-registered study among German adults, we studied both situation-specific tendencies and stable personality traits that are theoretically associated with these pillars in relation to self-reported physical distancing behavior and underlying motives. Results supported the importance of each of the proposed pillars for physical distancing behavior. That is, for each pillar, we found (some) relations of the corresponding tendencies and personality traits with physical distancing (motives) as expected. Overall, the project provides a comprehensive picture of physical distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The research Ethics committee of the Faculty of Pedagogy and Psychology (ELTE) granted a central permission (permission nr: 2019/47). Many other labs obtained IRB approval too, which approvals can be found here: https://osf.io/j6kte/ . Participants had to give informed consent before starting the experiment. Only participants recruited through Mturk or Prolific received monetary compensation.Note that full information on the approval of the study protocol must also be provided in the manuscript.

Individuals’ punishment goals depend on the perceived cause of the misbehavior. However, a corresponding attributional model of punishment goals has only been studied in legal domains—but was largely ignored in others, such as the educational domain, in which student misbehavior is a main stressor for both teachers and students. Thus, we investigated teachers’ punishment goals in classroom settings depending on their attribution of student misbehavior. Specifically, we asked laypeople (Experiment 1), pre-service teachers (Experiment 2), and in-service teachers (Experiment 3) to read several versions of a scenario describing a student destroying the belongings of another student. Using a 2 × 2 within-subjects design, we manipulated the stability (stable vs. unstable) and controllability (controllable vs. uncontrollable) of the cause of the misbehavior. Results show that the support of retribution as a punishment goal in classroom interventions is largely independent of the perceived cause of the misbehavior. By contrast, the support of special prevention (preventing future misbehavior by the offending student) and general prevention (preventing future misbehavior by other students) is primarily subject to the perceived controllability of the misbehavior. Overall, this shows that models of punishment behavior developed in other domains cannot simply be applied to teachers’ classroom intervention strategies.

People willingly accept personal costs to sanction norm violations even if they are not personally affected by the wrongdoing and even if their sanctioning yields no immediate benefits—a behavior known as third-party punishment. A notable body of literature suggests that this behavior is primarily driven by retribution (i.e., evening out the harm caused), rather than by the utilitarian motives of special prevention (i.e., preventing recidivism), or general prevention (i.e., preventing imitation). This has led to the conclusion that laypeople are “retributivists” in general. More recent evidence, however, raises doubts about the ubiquity of retributivism, showing that punishment is driven by multiple motives. The present research adds to this debate by investigating the motives underlying punishment in children around age 10. Specifically, we investigate children’s (N = 238) punishment motives in an economic game paradigm, isolating punishment motives by experimentally manipulating the extent to which the offender and a bystander learn about the punishment. This offers the possibility to examine whether (and to what extent) children engage in punishment even when it is devoid of any preventive effects. Results show that children’s punishment is motivated by retributive, special preventive, and general preventive purposes. These results point to a clear need for further theory specification on the motivational basis of punishment in humans and provide practical implications for the treatment of child misbehavior.

Punishing offenders for their misdeeds can restore a sense of justice achieved (i.e., justice-related satisfaction) among victims and increase their willingness to reconcile, especially if offenders signal that they understand why punishment has been inflicted on them. In this article, we theoretically disentangle and empirically test two explanations for this effect. One possible interpretation for this effect is that offender feedback empowers the victim and that empowerment is the crucial prerequisite for reconciliation. An alternative interpretation is that offender feedback benefits the victim because it suggests that the punishment had an educational effect and initiated a positive "moral change" in the offender. Six studies-four scenario and two autobiographic recall studies (combined N = 2,134)-suggest that the positive effects of offender feedback on victims' justice-related satisfaction and willingness to reconcile cannot be reduced to empowerment. Empowerment and moral change rather constitute two independent mechanisms explaining when and why punishment facilitates the posttransgression process. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings (e.g., for restorative justice procedures).