The influence of social norms on the development of third-party punishment across societies

• In Event: Moral development across cultures: from judgment to behavior

Abstract

Human cooperation is likely supported by our tendency to punish selfishness in others. Selective punishment of third-party individuals (Third-Party Punishment) who act selfishly can promote cooperation by reducing the benefits of free-riding without harming cooperators, making cooperation a relatively more attractive choice to individuals (Boyd et al., 2010). Some researchers argue that Third-Party Punishment (hereafter ‘punishment’) is at least partly motivated by culturally-specific norms (Richerson et al., 2016), which are acquired through a universal human psychology for learning and conforming to norms (House et al., 2020). Developmental data provide a means to examine the influence of norms on punishment, by revealing how the emergence of punishment in children is associated with an increasing sensitivity to norms. However, to date there has been little work directly linking social norms to the development of punishment across societies, a crucial gap filled by the present study.

Here, we explored the impact of normative information on the development of punishment in 603 children aged 4-14 years, across six diverse cultural groups: Germans (Berlin), Wichí people (Misión Chaqueña, Argentina), Argentinians (La Plata), Americans (Phoenix), Shuar people (Amazonia, Ecuador), and Indians (Pune). We used a version of the Third-Party Punishment Game (TPPG) which was designed to be both child-appropriate and comparable across field sites. Child subjects were told about the choices of third parties in a binary sharing game: the third party could either (i) make a prosocial choice or a (ii) make a self-maximizing choice. Subjects were also shown a video which communicated normative information about whether it was right or wrong to punish the third parties (i.e. social norms), and subjects were then given an opportunity to pay a personal cost to punish the third party. From children’s punishment decisions we assessed (i) the development of punishment across societies, and (ii) the influence social norms on punishment as it was developing.

We found that children began to perform punishment during middle childhood, and the developmental trajectories of this behavior were similar across societies (Figure 1). In further analyses, we found that social norms began to influence the likelihood of punishment during middle childhood in some of these societies (but not all), and that norms specifying the punishment of selfishness were generally more influential than norms specifying the punishment of prosocial behavior. These findings support the view that punishment of selfishness is important in all societies, and its development is shaped by a shared psychology for responding to normative information. Yet, the results also highlight the important role that children’s prior knowledge of local norms may play in explaining societal variation in the development of both third-party punishment and prosociality.

Authors

• Bailey House
  Presenting Author

• Patricia Kanngiesser, University of Plymouth
  Non-Presenting Author

• H. Clark Barrett, University of California, Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author

• Süheyla Yilmaz, Leipzig University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Carla Sebastian-Enesco
  Non-Presenting Author

• Alejandro Erut, University of California - Los Angeles
  Non-Presenting Author

• Joan Silk, Arizona State University
  Non-Presenting Author