Communicating emotions, but not expressing them privately, reduces moral punishment in a Prisoner's Dilemma game

Time pressure and deliberation affect moral punishment

The deliberate-morality account implies that moral punishment should be decreased with time pressure and increased with deliberation while the intuitive-morality account predicts the opposite. In three experiments, moral punishment was examined in a simultaneous one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. The players cooperated or defected and then decided whether or not to punish their partners. In Experiment 1, the punishment decisions were made without or with time pressure. In Experiment 2, the punishment decisions were immediate or delayed by pauses in which participants deliberated their decisions. In Experiment 3, participants were asked to deliberate self-interest or fairness before deciding whether to punish their partners. Different types of punishment were distinguished using the cooperation-and-punishment model. In Experiment 1, time pressure decreased moral punishment. In Experiment 2, deliberation increased moral punishment. So far, the evidence supports the deliberate-morality account. Experiment 3 demonstrates that the effect of deliberation depends on what is deliberated. When participants deliberated self-interest rather than fairness, moral punishment was decreased. The results suggest that unguided deliberation increases moral punishment, but the effects of deliberation are modulated by the type of deliberation that takes place. These results strengthen a process-based account of punishment which offers a more nuanced understanding of the context-specific effect of deliberation on moral punishment than the deliberate-morality account.

People punish defection, not failures to conform to the majority

Do people punish others for defecting or for failing to conform to the majority? In two experiments, we manipulated whether the participants' partners cooperated or defected in the majority of the trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. The effects of this base-rate manipulation on cooperation and punishment were assessed using a multinomial processing tree model. High compared to low cooperation rates of the partners increased participants' cooperation. When participants' cooperation was not enforced through partner punishment, the participants' cooperation was closely aligned to the cooperation rates of the partners. Moral punishment of defection increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. However, antisocial punishment of cooperation when defection rates were high was much less likely than moral punishment of defection when cooperation rates were high. In addition, antisocial punishment was increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. The latter two results contradict the assumption that people punish conformity-violating behavior regardless of whether the behavior supports or disrupts cooperation. Punishment is thus sensitive to the rates of cooperation and defection but, overall, the results are inconsistent with the idea that punishment primarily, let alone exclusively, serves to enforce conformity with the majority.