Antisocial punishment across societies

Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, Simon Gächter

 

Science, Vol. 319, no. 5868, 7 March 2008, pp. 1362-1367

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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Links to labs/institutions were we ran the experiments:

 

Some pictures from the labs:

 

 

(The pictures show the labs in Chengdu, Bonn, Riyadh, Seoul, Zurich, Melbourne, Nottingham, Copenhagen and Dnipropetrovs'k; the pictures were taken after the experiments).

 

 

Acknowledgments:

 

This project would not have been possible without the generous support from many people who helped us in the organization and/or the conduct of the experiments. Special thanks go to (in alphabetical order): Fikret Adaman, Mohammed Al-Atiq, Majid Al-Balushi, Khalid Abdullah Al-Mosa, Abdullah A. Al-Mosa, Zaher Al-Rashdi, Hatem Al-Shanfarim, Ahmed Al-Shery, Laith Al-Sulaiman, Khalid Al-Yahya, Mohammed Al-Yahya, Sener Atas, Michael Belaev, Hans Bormann, Alexey Bratuta, Alexei Brumin, Stephan Cramon-Taubadel, Zhao Chuanhui, Huang Dengshi, Michalis Drouvelis, Spilios Drouvelis, Tang Fangfang, Toke Fosgaard, Hong Geng, Pablo Guillen, Ali Gunes, Özgür Gürerk, Taejoon Han, Fu Hao, Heike Hennig-Schmidt, Hun Hilal, Jafar Ibrahimov, Eduard Jankovski, Ding Jieyao, Wan Jing, Ruslan Kabalin, Esther Kessler, Viktoriya Koleva, Gizem Korkmaz, Ki Lee, Shi Young Lee, Liu Leilei, Li Manmei, Michael Marx, Angelos Mimis, Katerina Mozulenko, Ayse Mumcu, Victor Nedzvetsky, Nikos Nikiforakis, Theodosios Palaskas, Kie-Duck Park, Ernesto Reuben, Sergej Sundeev, Jean-Robert Tyran, Aliaksandr Vitkouski, Daniel Wiesen, Li Weiwei, Chaoliang Yang, Ahsen Yuksel, Zhang Zhengzheng, Zeng Zhiyuan, Sergiy Zorya, and Svitlana Zorya.

 

 

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