Department of Psychology, University of Miami.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2018 Apr;147(4):514-544. doi: 10.1037/xge0000410.
Many social scientists believe humans possess an evolved motivation to punish violations of norms-including norm violations that do not harm them directly. However, most empirical evidence for so-called altruistic punishment comes from experimental economics games that create experimental demand for third-party punishment, raising the possibility that the third-party punishment uncovered in these experiments has been motivated by a desire to appear concerned about social norms rather than by actual concern about upholding them. Here we present the results of five experiments in which we used an aggression paradigm to contrast second-party and third-party punishment with minimal experimental demand. We also summarize the results of these experiments meta-analytically. We found robust evidence that participants who were insulted by a stranger experienced anger and punished the insulter. To a lesser degree, participants who witnessed a friend receive an insult also became angry and punished the insulter. In contrast, we found robust evidence that participants who witnessed a stranger receive an insult did not punish the insulter, although they did experience modest amounts of anger. In only one experiment did we find any punishment on behalf of a stranger, and this result could plausibly be explained by the desire to escape the moral censure of other bystanders. Our results suggest that experimental designs that rely on demand-laden methods to test hypotheses about third-party punishment may have overstated the case for the existence of this trait. (PsycINFO Database Record
许多社会科学家认为，人类有一种进化而来的动机，去惩罚违反规范的行为，包括那些不会直接伤害到他们的规范违反行为。然而，所谓的利他惩罚的大多数经验证据来自于实验经济学游戏，这些游戏创造了对第三方惩罚的实验需求，这增加了一种可能性，即这些实验中发现的第三方惩罚可能是出于对社会规范的关注，而不是真正关心维护这些规范。在这里，我们提出了五项实验的结果，在这些实验中，我们使用攻击范式来对比第二方和第三方惩罚，同时最小化实验需求。我们还对这些实验进行了元分析总结。我们发现了有力的证据表明，被陌生人侮辱的参与者会感到愤怒并惩罚冒犯者。在较小程度上，目睹朋友受到侮辱的参与者也会感到愤怒并惩罚冒犯者。相比之下，我们发现有力的证据表明，目睹陌生人受到侮辱的参与者不会惩罚冒犯者，尽管他们确实会感到适度的愤怒。只有在一个实验中，我们发现了一些代表陌生人的惩罚，而这个结果可以合理地解释为，参与者想要逃避其他旁观者的道德谴责。我们的结果表明，依赖于充满需求的方法来测试关于第三方惩罚的假设的实验设计可能夸大了这种特征的存在。
