Communicating emotions, but not expressing them privately, reduces moral punishment in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game

Abstract

The existence of moral punishment, that is, the fact that cooperative people sacrifice resources to punish defecting partners requires an explanation. Potential explanations are that people punish defecting partners to privately express or to communicate their negative emotions in response to the experienced unfairness. If so, then providing participants with alternative ways to privately express or to communicate their emotions should reduce moral punishment. In two experiments, participants interacted with cooperating and defecting partners in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. After each round, participants communicated their emotions to their partners (Experiments 1 and 2) or only expressed them privately (Experiment 2). Each trial concluded with a costly punishment option. Compared to a no-expression control group, moral punishment was reduced when emotions were communicated to the defecting partner but not when emotions were privately expressed. Moral punishment may thus serve to communicate emotions to defecting partners. However, moral punishment was only reduced but far from being eliminated, suggesting that the communication of emotions does not come close to replacing moral punishment. Furthermore, prompting participants to focus on their emotions had undesirable side-effects: Privately expressing emotions diminished cooperation, enhanced hypocritical punishment (i.e., punishment of defecting partners by defecting participants), and induced an unspecific bias to punish the partners irrespective of their actions.

Time pressure and deliberation affect moral punishment

“…Even when participants deliberated their self-interest, they still morally punished unilateral defection with a high probability although this entailed sacrificing own costs for no apparent benefit and thereby went against their self-interest. Previous studies using the cooperation-and-punishment model have already demonstrated the robustness of participants’ inclination to morally punish unilateral defection which remained at a high level even when, for example, the majority of partners defected 58 or when participants were offered other ways to communicate their anger in response to the defection 57 . Taken together, these findings suggest that, despite being sensitive to contextual factors, people have a strong and robust preference for moral punishment which aligns with the moral preference hypothesis proposed by Capraro and Perc 87 .…”