Alam Raihan, Rai Tage S
Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego, CA 92093.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2025 Aug 26;122(34):e2508479122. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2508479122. Epub 2025 Aug 19.
Third-party punishment is theorized by some scholars to be essential to the evolution of large-scale cooperation, but empirically, it often fails to bring about its desired effects. Here, we suggest that third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation when third parties have profit motives to punish. Across nine economic games and judgment experiments (including four preregistered studies), we find that when third-party punishment is profitable, rates of cooperation decrease immediately and remain lower even when punishment outcomes are optimized to support cooperative behavior. Profitable third-party punishment causes targets of punishment to anticipate antisocial punishment and perceive social norms in terms of self-interest, suggesting that the introduction of payment degrades the communicative signals that punishment is meant to convey about punishers' intentions and social norms. Critically, participants who would benefit from increased cooperation inadvertently reduce their own monetary compensation by opting in to experimental conditions that pay punishers, suggesting that they intuitively fail to consider the signaling consequences of profit motives to punish. Implications for systems of punishment and cooperation in real-world contexts are discussed.
一些学者从理论上认为第三方惩罚对于大规模合作的演变至关重要，但从实证角度来看，它往往无法产生预期效果。在此，我们表明当第三方有惩罚的获利动机时，第三方惩罚会破坏合作。通过九个经济博弈和判断实验（包括四项预先注册的研究），我们发现当第三方惩罚有利可图时，合作率会立即下降，即使惩罚结果经过优化以支持合作行为，合作率仍会保持在较低水平。有利可图的第三方惩罚会使惩罚对象预期到反社会惩罚，并从自身利益角度看待社会规范，这表明引入报酬会削弱惩罚旨在传达的关于惩罚者意图和社会规范的交流信号。至关重要的是，那些本可从增加合作中受益的参与者，通过选择进入向惩罚者支付报酬的实验条件，无意中减少了自己的货币补偿，这表明他们直观上没有考虑到惩罚获利动机的信号后果。我们还讨论了其对现实世界中惩罚与合作体系的影响。
