Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2008

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Science

Volume

319

Issue

5868

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science

First Page

1362

Last Page

1367

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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Originally published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Publisher's PDF and HTML fulltext available through remote link.

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