Citation

Pleasant A, Barclay P. Psychol. Sci. 2018; 29(6): 868-876.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, University of Guelph.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Association for Psychological Science, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1177/0956797617752642

PMID

29708860

Abstract

When choosing social partners, people prefer good cooperators (all else being equal). Given this preference, people wishing to be chosen can either increase their own cooperation to become more desirable or suppress others' cooperation to make them less desirable. Previous research shows that very cooperative people sometimes get punished ("antisocial punishment") or criticized ("do-gooder derogation") in many cultures. Here, we used a public-goods game with punishment to test whether antisocial punishment is used as a means of competing to be chosen by suppressing others' cooperation. As predicted, there was more antisocial punishment when participants were competing to be chosen for a subsequent cooperative task (a trust game) than without a subsequent task. This difference in antisocial punishment cannot be explained by differences in contributions, moralistic punishment, or confusion. This suggests that antisocial punishment is a social strategy that low cooperators use to avoid looking bad when high cooperators escalate cooperation.

Language: en

Keywords

biological markets; competitive altruism; do-gooder derogation; open data; open materials; partner choice; public-goods games