The unresponsive avenger: More evidence that disinterested third parties do not punish altruistically.

Abstract

Many social scientists believe humans possess an evolved motivation to punish violations of norms-including norm violations that do not harm them directly. However, most empirical evidence for so-called altruistic punishment comes from experimental economics games that create experimental demand for third-party punishment, raising the possibility that the third-party punishment uncovered in these experiments has been motivated by a desire to appear concerned about social norms rather than by actual concern about upholding them. Here we present the results of five experiments in which we used an aggression paradigm to contrast second-party and third-party punishment with minimal experimental demand. We also summarize the results of these experiments meta-analytically. We found robust evidence that participants who were insulted by a stranger experienced anger and punished the insulter. To a lesser degree, participants who witnessed a friend receive an insult also became angry and punished the insulter. In contrast, we found robust evidence that participants who witnessed a stranger receive an insult did not punish the insulter, although they did experience modest amounts of anger. In only one experiment did we find any punishment on behalf of a stranger, and this result could plausibly be explained by the desire to escape the moral censure of other bystanders. Our results suggest that experimental designs that rely on demand-laden methods to test hypotheses about third-party punishment may have overstated the case for the existence of this trait. (PsycINFO Database Record

When and Why Do Third Parties Punish Outside of the Lab? A Cross-Cultural Recall Study

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Punishment: one tool, many uses

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“…duels and other ritualised contests) that circumscribe the contexts in which punishment can be administered, perhaps to limit these detrimental consequences (Boehm 2011). As a consequence, decentralised peer punishment of the variety studied in experimental economic games is often rare or absent among humans in the real world (Guala 2012;Pedersen et al 2018;Wiessner 2005), although it tends to be more common in contexts where such customs are lacking (reviewed in Jackson et al 2019). These findings speak to a more specific insight, which is that for punishment to be effective as a tool to convert cheaters into co-operators, it must be perceived as legitimate (Baldassarri and Grossman 2011;Bowles and Gintis 2013;Ertan et al 2009;Faillo et al 2013;Gross et al 2016;Tyler 2006;Villatoro et al 2014;Xiao and Tan 2014;Zheng and Nie 2013).…”

The effect of sleep deprivation on objective and subjective measures of facial appearance

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