The motivational basis of third-party punishment in children

Abstract

People willingly accept personal costs to sanction norm violations even if they are not personally affected by the wrongdoing and even if their sanctioning yields no immediate benefits—a behavior known as third-party punishment. A notable body of literature suggests that this behavior is primarily driven by retribution (i.e., evening out the harm caused), rather than by the utilitarian motives of special prevention (i.e., preventing recidivism), or general prevention (i.e., preventing imitation). This has led to the conclusion that laypeople are “retributivists” in general. More recent evidence, however, raises doubts about the ubiquity of retributivism, showing that punishment is driven by multiple motives. The present research adds to this debate by investigating the motives underlying punishment in children around age 10. Specifically, we investigate children’s (N = 238) punishment motives in an economic game paradigm, isolating punishment motives by experimentally manipulating the extent to which the offender and a bystander learn about the punishment. This offers the possibility to examine whether (and to what extent) children engage in punishment even when it is devoid of any preventive effects. Results show that children’s punishment is motivated by retributive, special preventive, and general preventive purposes. These results point to a clear need for further theory specification on the motivational basis of punishment in humans and provide practical implications for the treatment of child misbehavior.

Toddlers' expectations of third‐party punishments and rewards following an act of aggression

“…This sensitivity is later expressed in older children's propensity to engage in costly third-party punishments for retributive (such as wanting an antisocial puppet to suffer as a form of "just desert") and consequentialist motives (such as wanting to deter future harms by teaching the transgressor lesson; see Marshall, Wynn et al, 2020). Indeed, it could be the case that toddlers, like older children, expected the bystander to punish the nondefender puppet because they wanted the non-defender to learn a lesson, and not because they wanted the non-defender to suffer (Marshall, Wynn et al, 2020;Twardawski & Hilbig, 2020). Furthermore, this data extends previous findings on young children's punitive motivations (Kenward & Östh, 2015;Marshall et al, 2019McAuliffe et al, 2015;Mendes et al, 2018;Riedl et al, 2015) suggesting a stable relation between toddlers' expectations about a bystander's rewarding and punitive motivations and children's behaviors.…”

Cognitive and Affective Processes in Children’s Third-Party Punishment

“…This interpretation is strengthened by recent studies that investigated children's 3PP behaviour (rather than 3PP affective states) under different conditions to isolate their punishment motives. Children's willingness to punish transgressors (measured both in terms of punishment frequency and costs incurred to punish) has been found to be higher when 3PP satisfied deterrent motives (i.e., teaching transgressors a lesson) compared to when it satisfied retributive motives (i.e., punishment for punishment's sake) (Marshall et al, 2021;Twardawski & Hilbig, 2020).…”

Who May Punish How?

“…Finally, 4- to 7-year-olds showed third-party punishment for retributive and consequentialist motives (Marshall et al, 2020), suggesting that already children this age punish for different reasons. Children between 9 and 12 years of age punished for retributive, special, and general preventive motives (Twardawski & Hilbig, 2020). Finally, school is an important context for the formation and internalization of moral concepts (Pretsch et al, 2016).…”