Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

by: Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thoni, Simon Gachter

Science, Vol. 319, No. 5868. (7 March 2008), pp. 1362-1367.

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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. 10.1126/science.1153808

@article{citeulike:2486357, 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. 10.1126/science.1153808}, author = {Herrmann, Benedikt and Thoni, Christian and Gachter, Simon }, citeulike-article-id = {2486357}, doi = {10.1126/science.1153808}, journal = {Science}, keywords = {punishment}, month = {March}, number = {5868}, pages = {1362--1367}, posted-at = {2008-03-12 03:05:29}, priority = {2}, title = {Antisocial Punishment Across Societies}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1153808}, volume = {319}, year = {2008} }

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TY - JOUR ID - citeulike:2486357 L3 - citeulike-article-id:2486357 TI - Antisocial Punishment Across Societies JF - Science VL - 319 IS - 5868 SP - 1362 EP - 1367 N2 - 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. 10.1126/science.1153808 KW - punishment AU - Herrmann, Benedikt AU - Thoni, Christian AU - Gachter, Simon PY - 2008/03/07/ UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1153808 ER -

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