Dispositional free riders do not free ride on punishment

Abstract

Strong reciprocity explains prosocial cooperation by the presence of individuals who incur costs to help those who helped them (‘strong positive reciprocity’) and to punish those who wronged them (‘strong negative reciprocity’). Theories of social preferences predict that in contrast to ‘strong reciprocators’, self-regarding people cooperate and punish only if there are sufficient future benefits. Here, we test this prediction in a two-stage design. First, participants are classified according to their disposition towards strong positive reciprocity as either dispositional conditional cooperators (DCC) or dispositional free riders (DFR). Participants then play a one-shot public goods game, either with or without punishment. As expected, DFR cooperate only when punishment is possible, whereas DCC cooperate without punishment. Surprisingly, dispositions towards strong positive reciprocity are unrelated to strong negative reciprocity: punishment by DCC and DFR is practically identical. The ‘burden of cooperation’ is thus carried by a larger set of individuals than previously assumed.

The source of punishment matters: Third-party punishment restrains observers from selfish behaviors better than does second-party punishment by shaping norm perceptions

“…Secondparty punishment (SPP) might be inflicted to increase future personal benefits by deterring the offender's repeated selfish behaviors [14]. Previous empirical studies have found that when an individual's personal interests are harmed by defection, even those who have defected themselves tend to punish the defector in the same manner as those who have not defected [15,16].…”

Conditional Punishment: Descriptive Social Norms Drive Negative Reciprocity

“…Our setup enables us to classify individual participants according to how their punishment decisions respond to descriptive norms, thereby deepening empirical understanding of individual differences in (conditional) punishment. Individual differences in conditional cooperation have received considerable attention in prior research, indicating that the dynamics of cooperation in groups strongly depend on the interplay of individuals' conditional strategies and their beliefs about others' cooperativeness (40,50,51). In sharp contrast, little is known about individual differences in conditional punishment and the way in which these differences may affect the emergence of cooperation.…”

Social evaluation boosts cooperation by enhancing guilt aversion: an effect diminished in primary psychopathic traits

“…Neuroimaging studies have revealed that monetary and social reward share similar neural mechanisms (6). In laboratory research, cooperative behaviors were significantly elevated when the subjects' choices were associated with the costs of monetary benefits (7,8), social reputation (5,9) or both (10,11). For example, PGG studies demonstrated that financial punishment can strongly elevate contribution (12), even in dispositional free riders (8).…”