Experimental evidence shows that negative motive attribution drives counter-punishment

Abstract

Evidence shows that the willingness of individuals to avenge punishment inflicted upon them for transgressions they committed constitutes a significant obstacle towards upholding social norms and cooperation. The drivers of the desire to counter-punish, however, are not well understood. We hypothesize that negative motive attribution – the tendency to assign negative motives to punishers for their actions – increases the likelihood of counter-punishment. We test this hypothesis in a lab experiment in which we exogenously manipulate the ability to attribute negative motives to punishers by having the punisher be either an unaffected third party or the victim of a transgression (second party). We show that individuals consider second-party punishment to be substantially more biased than an identical, payoff-equalizing punishment meted out by a third party. In line with our hypothesis, we find that second-party punishers are 66.3% more likely to be counter-punished than third-party punishers, and suffer a loss in earnings which is 64.6% higher, all else equal. Our findings have implications for designing mechanisms to uphold cooperation and reduce conflict.