How would you react if someone cut in line behind you? Some people will warn others to follow the rules, even if it does not affect them. This is known as altruistic punishment, the act of punishing others for selfish behavior without reciprocal benefit.
Previous studies on altruistic punishment often placed participants in unnatural settings where they were compelled to observe the selfishness of others and decided whether to punish them. In reality, there are times when avoidance of such a situation takes precedence over confronting unfairness. In other words, a person could pretend they did not notice someone cutting in line behind them. Recent research suggests that when people have a choice about whether to witness the selfish actions of others, they are more likely to avoid it.
Based on this, graduate student Kodai Mitsuishi and Associate Professor Yuta Kawamura at Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences investigated whether the avoidance of witnessing selfish behavior is to evade administering punishment or because people don’t want to deal with this behavior. They developed a situation-selective third-party punishment game (SS-TPPG) for this study.
In the SS-TPPG, participants repeatedly chose between two card decks—fair and unfair decks—each offering different probabilities of fair and unfair monetary distributions between two individuals. This setup simulated scenarios where participants might witness unfairness. In addition, the researchers varied punishment options available to participants to examine how these factors influenced participants’ willingness to confront or avoid unfair behavior. As a result, it was revealed that the avoidance of encountering selfishness arises from both the motivation not to witness inequality and desire to avoid confrontation.
The researchers also showed that even participants who tended to avoid unfairness would hand out punishment if they were forced to observe such unfairness. Furthermore, it was found that when participants were given the option of indirectly punishing others, they were less likely to avoid observing unfair situations.
“The results of this study suggest that altruistic punishment, which was often seen in previous studies, may be less frequent in real life,” said Mitsuishi.
“In the future, we need to further consider what factors are suppressing people’s selfishness and maintaining a cooperative society without altruistic punishment,” concluded Professor Kawamura.
The findings were published in the
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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