Promoting cooperation in social dilemmas: the use of sanctions

Reward, punishment, and prosocial behavior: Recent developments and implications

Reward and punishment change the payoff structures of social interactions and therefore can potentially play a role in promoting prosocial behavior. Yet, there are boundary conditions for them to be effective. We review recent work that addresses the conditions under which rewards and punishment can enhance prosocial behavior, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms for individuals' rewarding and punishing decisions, and the reputational and behavioral consequences of reward and punishment under noise. The reviewed evidence points to the importance of more field research on how reward and punishment can promote prosocial behavior in real-world settings. We also highlight the need to integrate different methodologies to better examine the effects of reward and punishment on prosocial behavior.

Why Hate the Good Guy? Antisocial Punishment of High Cooperators Is Greater When People Compete To Be Chosen

When choosing social partners, people prefer good cooperators (all else being equal). Given this preference, people wishing to be chosen can either increase their own cooperation to become more desirable or suppress others’ cooperation to make them less desirable. Previous research shows that very cooperative people sometimes get punished (“antisocial punishment”) or criticized (“do-gooder derogation”) in many cultures. Here, we used a public-goods game with punishment to test whether antisocial punishment is used as a means of competing to be chosen by suppressing others’ cooperation. As predicted, there was more antisocial punishment when participants were competing to be chosen for a subsequent cooperative task (a trust game) than without a subsequent task. This difference in antisocial punishment cannot be explained by differences in contributions, moralistic punishment, or confusion. This suggests that antisocial punishment is a social strategy that low cooperators use to avoid looking bad when high cooperators escalate cooperation.

Sadism, the Intuitive System, and Antisocial Punishment in the Public Goods Game

In public goods situations, a specific destructive behavior emerges when individuals face the possibility of punishing others: antisocial punishment, that is, costly punishing cooperative individuals. So far, little is known about the (intuitive or reflective) processes underlying antisocial punishment. Building on the Social Heuristics Hypothesis and arguing that antisocial punishment reflects the basic characteristics of sadism, namely, aggressive behavior to dominate and to harm other individuals it is assumed that everyday sadists intuitively engage in antisocial punishment. Two studies document that activating (Study 1) and inhibiting (Study 2) the intuitive system when a punishment option can be realized in one-shot iterated public goods games increased (Study 1) and reduced (Study 2) antisocial punishment, in particular among individuals who reported a proneness to sadism. In sum, the present research suggests that sadistic tendencies executed intuitively play a crucial role regarding antisocial punishment in public goods situations.