When do we punish people who don’t?
Name
SSRN-id3080990.pdf
Description
Accepted version
Size
725.71 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
b71e0087f0c23669e92751a5710eedc5
Author(s)
Martin, Justin W
Jordan, Jillian J
Rand, David G
Cushman, Fiery
Date Issued
2019
Journal
Cognition
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
© 2019 Elsevier B.V. People often punish norm violations. In what cases is such punishment viewed as normative—a behavior that we “should” or even “must” engage in? We approach this question by asking when people who fail to punish a norm violator are, themselves, punished. (For instance, a boss who fails to punish transgressive employees might, herself, be fired.) We conducted experiments exploring the contexts in which higher-order punishment occurs, using both incentivized economic games and hypothetical vignettes describing everyday situations. We presented participants with cases in which an individual fails to punish a transgressor, either as a victim (second party) or as an observer (third party). Across studies, we consistently observed higher-order punishment of non-punishing observers. Higher-order punishment of non-punishing victims, however, was consistently weaker, and sometimes non-existent. These results demonstrate the selective application of higher-order punishment, provide a new perspective on the psychological mechanisms that support it, and provide some clues regarding its function.
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.COGNITION.2019.104040
