Dishonesty invites costly third-party punishment

Ohtsubo, Yohsuke; Masuda, Fumiko; Watanabe, Esuka; Masuchi, Ayumi

doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.12.007

Cited by 37 publications

(27 citation statements)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Lett. 11: 20150172 substantially reduced the frequency of punishers, compared with the original study [9], the first analysis showed that there were still more punishers in the dishonesty condition than in the honesty condition. It is noteworthy that the reward option was a viable choice in this study.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

“…Removing two additional methodological problems (i.e. problems 1 and 2) from the original research [9], which already precluded the other three problems, reduced the punishment rate from 53 to 27% (i.e. 9/33) in the dishonesty condition.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One explanation for the evolution of human cooperation is strong reciprocity, which assumes that people have inclinations for 'unconditional cooperation' and 'altruistic punishment against norm violators' [1]. Accumulated experimental evidence indicates that people incur some cost to punish norm violators even when they themselves or their relatives are not harmed by the norm violation [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Such altruistic third-party punishment has been observed among young children [6] and in many preliterate societies [7,8], let alone in conventional adult samples in modern societies.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is a study [9] that observed third-party punishment against dishonesty, instead of unfairness, which precluded three of the five methodological problems. In that study, a dishonest player lied to a second player by exaggerating his/her generosity, but then behaved in a fair manner (figure 1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

Konishi

Ohtsubo

2015

Biol. Lett.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Many experiments have demonstrated that people are willing to incur cost to punish norm violators even when they are not directly harmed by the violation. Such altruistic third-party punishment is often considered an evolutionary underpinning of large-scale human cooperation. However, some scholars argue that previously demonstrated altruistic third-party punishment against fairness-norm violations may be an experimental artefact. For example, envy-driven retaliatory behaviour (i.e. spite) towards better-off unfair game players may be misidentified as altruistic punishment. Indeed, a recent experiment demonstrated that participants ceased to inflict third-party punishment against an unfair player once a series of key methodological problems were systematically controlled for. Noticing that a previous finding regarding apparently altruistic third-party punishment against honesty-norm violations may have been subject to methodological issues, we used a different and what we consider to be a more sound design to evaluate these findings. Third-party punishment against dishonest players withstood this more stringent test.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 72%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

Konishi

Ohtsubo

2015

Biol. Lett.

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…A reputation as a deceiver can result in a broad range of specific costs, such as intensely negative reactions from others [6], aggravated third-party punishment [7], and fewer opportunities to join partners coalitions [8]. Another risk, rare but real, is to be targeted for blackmail by unscrupulous agents [9].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Decision Makers Use Norms, Not Cost-Benefit Analysis, When Choosing to Conceal or Reveal Unfair Rewards

et al. 2013

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We introduce the Conceal or Reveal Dilemma, in which individuals receive unfair benefits, and must decide whether to conceal or to reveal this unfair advantage. This dilemma has two important characteristics: it does not lend itself easily to cost-benefit analysis, neither to the application of any strong universal norm. As a consequence, it is ideally suited to the study of interindividual and intercultural variations in moral-economic norms. In this paper we focus on interindividual variations, and we report four studies showing that individuals cannot be swayed by financial incentives to conceal or to reveal, and follow instead fixed, idiosyncratic strategies. We discuss how this result can be extended to individual and cultural variations in the tendency to display or to hide unfair rewards.

show abstract

The processing course of conflicts in third‐party punishment: An event‐related potential study

Dou

Cheng

et al. 2014

PsyCh Journal

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In social decision-making games, uninvolved third parties usually severely punish norm violators, even though the punishment is costly for them. For this irrational behavior, the conflict caused by punishment satisfaction and monetary loss is obvious. In the present study, 18 participants observed a Dictator Game and were asked about their willingness to incur some cost to change the offers by reducing the dictator's money. A response-locked event-related potential (ERP) component, the error negativity or error-related negativity (Ne/ERN), which is evoked by error or conflict, was analyzed to investigate whether a trade-off between irrational punishment and rational private benefit occurred in the brain responses of third parties. We examined the effect of the choice type ("to change the offer" or "not to change the offer") and levels of unfairness (90:10 and 70:30) on Ne/ERN amplitudes. The results indicated that there was an ERN effect for unfair offers as Ne/ERN amplitudes were more negative for not to change the offer choices than for to change the offer choices, which suggested that participants encountered more conflict when they did not change unfair offers. Furthermore, it was implied that altruistic punishment, rather than rational utilitarianism, might be the prepotent tendency for humans that is involved in the early stage of decision-making.

show abstract

Dishonesty invites costly third-party punishment

Cited by 37 publications

References 20 publications

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test

Decision Makers Use Norms, Not Cost-Benefit Analysis, When Choosing to Conceal or Reveal Unfair Rewards

The processing course of conflicts in third‐party punishment: An event‐related potential study

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About