Thursday, October 04, 2007

Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?

Audience effects on moralistic punishment

Robert Kurzban, Peter DeScioli & Erin O'Brien
Evolution and Human Behavior, March 2007, Pages 75-84

Abstract:
Punishment has been proposed as being central to two distinctively human
phenomena: cooperation in groups and morality. Here we investigate
moralistic punishment, a behavior designed to inflict costs on another
individual in response to a perceived moral violation. There is currently no
consensus on which evolutionary model best accounts for this phenomenon in
humans. Models that turn on individuals' cultivating reputations as
moralistic punishers clearly predict that psychological systems should be
designed to increase punishment in response to information that one's
decisions to punish will be known by others. We report two experiments in
which we induce participants to commit moral violations and then present
third parties with the opportunity to pay to punish wrongdoers. Varying
conditions of anonymity, we find that the presence of an audience - even if
only the experimenter - causes an increase in moralistic punishment.


(Nod to KL)

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