Punishing the individual or the group for norm violation

Abstract

Background: It has recently been proposed that a key motivation for joining groups is the protection from consequences of negative behaviours, such as norm violations. Here we empirically test this claim by investigating whether cooperative decisions and the punishment of associated fairness-based norm violations are different in individuals vs. collectives in economic games. Methods: In the ultimatum game, participants made or received offers that they could reject at a cost to their outcome, a form of social punishment. In the dictator game with third-party punishment, participants made offers to a receiver while being observed by a punisher, or could themselves punish unfair offers. Results: Participants made lower offers when making their decision as part of a group as compared to alone. This difference correlated with participants’ overall mean offers: those who were generally less generous were even less so in a group, suggesting that the collective structure was compatible with their intention. Participants were slower when punishing vs not punishing an unfair offer. Importantly here, they were slower when deciding whether to punish or not to punish groups as compared to individuals, only when the offer concerned them directly in second party punishment. Participants thus take more time to punish others, and to make their mind on whether to punish or not when facing a group of proposers. Conclusions: Together, these results show that people behave differently in a group, both in their willingness to share with others and in their punishment of norm violations. This could be explained by the fact that being in a collective structure allows to share responsibility with others, thereby protecting from negative consequences of norm violations.

Diffusion of Punishment in Collective Norm Violations

“…We found a robust reduction in proposed punishment across instances of intended and accidental harm when perpetrators acted as part of a group rather than lone agents. The contrast between these results and previous studies (Feldman & Rosen, 1978;El Zein et al, 2020) may be attributed to the more representative range of clearly and more strongly harmful causations (i.e., death) represented in our materials. That no diffusion of punishment was observed for attempted harm suggests that diffusion of punishment depends on discounting principle in causal attribution of harmful outcomes rather than intentions.…”

“…However, a follow-up experiment on hypothetical robberies failed to find corroborating evidence, a result ascribed to the small sample size (Feldman & Rosen, 1978). More recently, El Zein et al (2020) investigated second-party punishment in fairness-based group games but found no difference between proposed punishment for lone fairness violators compared with collective ones (El Zein et al, 2020). Another study of the punishment of cheaters showed that group actors were considered less dishonest than individual actors, but differences in judgments of deserved punishment were only marginally significant (p = .08; Vainapel et al, 2019).…”

“…The punishment diffusion observed for harmful outcomes can explain how individuals use group membership to minimize senses of regret and responsibility (El Zein et al, 2020) and protect themselves from the costs of morality violations like punishment (El Zein et al, 2019). Seeking 'safety in numbers' by acting as part of groups, each perpetrator may expect mitigated punishment and blame.…”

Shared responsibility decreases the sense of agency in the human brain

“…Responsibility context [1,2,3,4] as for the behavioural analyses: 1= Private, 2= Dyadic, 3= Group, 4= Forced. Please note that negative parameter estimates indicate higher activity for more responsibility.…”

“…Perhaps more alarmingly, collective context allows us to disavow ourselves of regret 7 as well as offload blame onto others 8 when outcomes are not good. Correspondingly, people find it harder to punish groups (vs individuals) who have violated a social norm 8 . In 2003, when weapons of mass destruction were not found in Iraq, or indeed over the following years, intelligence agencies whose reports had justified a catastrophic invasion of Iraq defended themselves by invoking that "everyone had agreed at the time".…”