Why do people punish? Evidence for a range of strategic concerns

Abstract

Costly punishment is thought to be a key mechanism sustaining human cooperation. However, the motives for punitive behaviour remain unclear. Although often assumed to be motivated by a desire to convert cheats into cooperators, punishment is also consistent with other functions, such as levelling payoffs or improving one’s relative position. We used six economic games to tease apart different motives for punishment and to explore whether different punishment strategies were associated with personality variables, political ideology, and religiosity. We used representative samples from the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 2010) to estimate the frequency of different punishment strategies in the population. The most common strategy was to never punish: prosocial individuals and those scoring high in honesty humility were among the least punitive in our sample, while religious individuals and those scoring high for right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation were more punitive. For people who did punish, strategy use was more consistent with egalitarian motives than behaviour-change motives. Nevertheless, different punishment strategies were also associated with personality, social preferences, political ideology, and religiosity. Self-reports of behaviour in the games suggested that people have some insight into their punishment strategy. These findings highlight the multipurpose nature of human punishment and show how the different motives underpinning punishment decisions are linked with core character traits.

The “motive cocktail” in altruistic behaviors

“…By capturing the interplay of multiple motives and their impact on behavioral patterns, our model enables more precise predictions of prosocial behavior. Leveraging insights from the "motive cocktail" model, interventions can be designed to account for the diverse motivations and experiences of individuals within society as well as cross culture background (Claessens et al, 2024), with the goal of creating a more cohesive and prosocial community. Meanwhile, further research needs to cover the gap between our over-simplified laboratory task and real-world applications.…”

“…According to one line of theories, third-party intervention serves as a strategic means to obtain future rewards, by signaling one's trustworthiness to potential cooperators (Bénabou & Tirole, 2006;Jordan et al, 2016) or deterring potential transgressors from harming oneself or valued others (Delton & Krasnow, 2017). However, third-party intervention in one-shot, anonymous scenarios (Fehr & Fischbacher, 2004) aligns more with the strong reciprocity theory (Gintis, 2000), where individuals may reward cooperation, punish non-cooperation, or more generally, sanction violations of social norms (Claessens et al, 2024;Kimbrough & Vostroknutov, 2016) even without prospect of personal gain. These two lines of theories are not necessarily conflicting; the motives for sanctioning norm violations can be viewed as internalized external motivations.…”