Material Benefits Crowd Out Moralistic Punishment

Abstract

Across four experiments with U.S.-based online participants ( N = 1,495 adults), I found that paying people to engage in moralistic punishment reduces their willingness to do so. In an economic game with real stakes, providing a monetary bonus for engaging in third-party punishment of unfair offers nearly cut participants’ willingness to do so in half. In judgments of hypothetical transgressions, participants viewed punishers who accepted payment as having worse character and rated the punishers’ punitive actions as less morally acceptable. Willingness to engage in punishment was restored if participants were offered large enough payments or were told that punishment accompanied by payment still signals moral virtue. Data were consistent with a signal-corruption mechanism whereby payment interferes with the prosocial signal that moralistic punishment provides about a punisher’s motives. These findings have implications for the cultural evolution of punishment and suggest that understanding perpetrators’ sociomoral incentives is essential to implementing conflict-reduction policies.

What people learn from punishment: joint inference of wrongness and punisher’s motivations from observation of punitive choices

“…removing resources from the target) could directly benefit them (e.g. if the punisher receives part of the 'spoils'; Eriksson et al, 2016;Rai, 2022). Adding a utility for direct selfish costs and benefits to the current choice model could capture this pattern of inferences as well (Radkani et al, 2022).…”

“…People do not simply associate severe punishment with trustworthy, competent, moral individuals responding to seri-ous harmful transgressions, though. In some contexts, thirdparties who choose to punish are judged as less trustworthy and more selfish than those who choose not to punish (Strimling & Eriksson, 2014;Eriksson, Andersson, & Strimling, 2016;Heffner & FeldmanHall, 2019;Rai, 2022;Sun, Jin, Yue, & Ren, 2022). People who use more severe punishment receive more disapproval, particularly if they stand to gain directly from the punishment (Eriksson et al, 2016;Rai, 2022).…”

“…In some contexts, thirdparties who choose to punish are judged as less trustworthy and more selfish than those who choose not to punish (Strimling & Eriksson, 2014;Eriksson, Andersson, & Strimling, 2016;Heffner & FeldmanHall, 2019;Rai, 2022;Sun, Jin, Yue, & Ren, 2022). People who use more severe punishment receive more disapproval, particularly if they stand to gain directly from the punishment (Eriksson et al, 2016;Rai, 2022). Even without direct benefits, people who choose harsh punishments are sometimes inferred to be taking selfish advantage, motivated to gain resources or power (Raihani & Bshary, 2015Redhead, Dhaliwal, & Cheng, 2021).…”

Can monetary incentives overturn fairness-based decisions?

“…Extending these previous findings, our results show that fairness-based punishment can be undermined by incentives that reward the acceptance of norm violations. Using an elegant modification of the third-party punishment paradigm, Rai [ 92 ] performed an online study in which participants had to perform a boring arithmetic task instead of giving up money to punish the norm-violator. Participants received a financial reward for performing this type of third-party punishment, corresponding to the set-up in the aligned punishment group in this study.…”

“…To disentangle the effects of fairness-based behaviour and monetary incentives, future studies may use non-monetary punishment, for example asking participants to perform a time-consuming task (cf. [ 92 ]).…”