Antisocial Punishment Across Societies
Abstract
We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.
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All authors contributed equally to this work. The authors thank various workshop audiences, in particular the Arts and Humanities Research Council workshops Culture and the Mind in Sheffield, and I. Bohnet, R. Boyd, S. Burks, E. Fehr, U. Fischbacher, D. Gambetta, H. Gintis, G. Grimalda, J. Henrich, P. Richerson, B. Rockenbach, R. Sapolsky, and R. Zeckhauser for helpful discussions. We are grateful for financial support from the University of Nottingham, the Grundlagenforschungsfonds at the University of St. Gallen, the Latsis Foundation (Geneva), and the EU-TMR Research Network ENDEAR (FMRX-CT98-0238). This paper is part of the MacArthur Foundation Network on Economic Environments and the Evolution of Individual Preferences and Social Norms.
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Published In
Science
Volume 319 | Issue 5868
7 March 2008
7 March 2008
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American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Submission history
Received: 5 December 2007
Accepted: 28 January 2008
Published in print: 7 March 2008
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