Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

There is a very interesting and surprising research article on the latest issue of Science. The behaviors of antisocial punishment, which were rarely considered in studies, were recorded in the public goods games. Are they related with the economical and political background of the different societies. The results said yes. And Herbert Gintis gave a concise perspective.

Science 7 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5868, pp. 1345 - 1346
DOI: 10.1126/science.1155333

Research Articles

Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, Simon Gächter
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.

In Gintis, he summarized,

"Herrmann et al. collected data in 15 countries with widely varying levels of economic development. The subjects were university students in all societies. The authors found that antisocial punishment was rare in the most democratic societies and very common otherwise. Indexed to the World Democracy Audit (WDA) evaluation of countries' performance in political rights, civil liberties, press freedom, and corruption, the top six performers among the countries studied were also in the lowest seven for antisocial punishment. These were the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Australia, and Switzerland. The seventh country in the low antisocial punishment group was China, currently among the fastest-growing market economies in the world. The countries with a high level of antisocial punishment and a low score on the WDA evaluation included Oman, Saudi Arabia, Greece, Russia, Turkey, and Belarus.

The most likely explanation is that in more traditional societies, the experimental setup represents a clash of cultures. On the one hand, high payoffs in the experiment require the modern ethic of cooperation with unrelated strangers, so subjects who are reprimanded for low contribution are likely to respond with feelings of guilt and a resolve to be more cooperative in the future. In a more traditional society, many players may hold to the ethic of altruism and sacrifice on behalf on one's family and friends, with indifference toward unrelated strangers. When punished, such subjects are likely to respond with anger rather than guilt. Punishing the high contributors is thus a means of asserting one's personal values, which take precedence over maximizing one's payoff in the game."

Does China's fast-growing market economy predict more and more prosocial civilians? I am not so sure...