2014
DOI: 10.1561/105.00000009
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'Altruistic' and 'Antisocial' Punishers are One and the Same

Abstract: 'Altruistic' and 'antisocial' punishers are one and the same AbstractIn certain economic experiments, some participants willingly pay a cost to punish peers who contribute too little to the public good. Because such punishment can lead to improved group outcomes, this costly punishment has been conceived of as altruistic. Here we provide evidence that individual variation in the propensity to punish low contributions is unrelated to altruism. First, individual use of punishment was uncorrelated with contributi… Show more

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Cited by 16 publications
(14 citation statements)
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“…This interpretation is consistent with Yamagishi et al 41 who find that rejections of unfair offers in ultimatum games are unrelated to prosocial cooperation in trust games and prisoner’s dilemma games. It is also consistent with experimental 34 , 40 , 42 and survey-based evidence 38 , 39 showing that behavioural measures consistent with strong positive and negative reciprocity are unrelated. Our experiments, which separate cooperative dispositions from behaviour, show that otherwise self-regarding people are therefore suddenly willing to bear the cost of disciplining wrongdoers, even in the absence of personal benefits for doing so.…”
Section: Discussionsupporting
confidence: 85%
See 1 more Smart Citation
“…This interpretation is consistent with Yamagishi et al 41 who find that rejections of unfair offers in ultimatum games are unrelated to prosocial cooperation in trust games and prisoner’s dilemma games. It is also consistent with experimental 34 , 40 , 42 and survey-based evidence 38 , 39 showing that behavioural measures consistent with strong positive and negative reciprocity are unrelated. Our experiments, which separate cooperative dispositions from behaviour, show that otherwise self-regarding people are therefore suddenly willing to bear the cost of disciplining wrongdoers, even in the absence of personal benefits for doing so.…”
Section: Discussionsupporting
confidence: 85%
“…As explained above, existing evidence in seeming support of the hypothesis of a positive correlation of strong positive and negative reciprocity—and also against it 38 42 —does not, with exceptions 33 35 , control for beliefs and expectations about others’ behaviour when determining dispositions towards cooperation. The current work makes a distinction between agents’ intrinsic disposition towards (first-order) cooperation and their actual cooperative behaviour in the presence of punishment, by employing a two-phase experimental design.…”
Section: Introductionmentioning
confidence: 95%
“…Prediction 1: Punishers should also be cooperative individuals In many models, the tendency to punish defectors is assumed to be linked to the tendency to cooperate, meaning that a punisher can also be assumed to be a cooperator (although the reverse is not necessarily true; Andrés Guzmán et al 2007;Bowles and Gintis 2004;Boyd et al 2003;Boyd and Richerson 1992;Henrich and Boyd 2001, but see Huang et al 2018;Eriksson et al 2014;Lehmann et al 2007;Úbeda and Duéñez-Guzmán 2011). This assumption has also been described in terms of a psychological propensity to behave as a strong reciprocator (an individual that has a preference to conditionally cooperate and to punish non-cooperators; Gintis 2000).…”
Section: The Evolution Of Punishmentmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…In particular, emotional reactions to winners and losers may trigger various positive and negative sanctions. Experimental research on use of sanctions following contributions to a public good indicates that individual variation in use of sanctions is not predicted by a single measure of prosociality (Eriksson et al, 2014). It may therefore be a very promising line of research to study individual variation in sanctioning behavior in social dilemmas using the MUA framework.…”
Section: Implications For Research On Social Dilemmasmentioning
confidence: 99%