Ostracism and fines in a public goods game with accidental contributions: The importance of punishment type
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2014, Vol 9, Issue 4
Abstract
Punishment is an important method for discouraging uncooperative behavior. We use a novel design for a public goods game in which players have explicit intended contributions with accidentally changed actual contributions, and in which players can apply costly fines or ostracism. Moreover, all players except the subject are automated, whereby we control the intended contributions, actual contributions, costly fines, and ostracisms experienced by the subject. We assess subject’s utilization of other players’ intended and actual contributions when making decisions to fine or ostracize. Hierarchical Bayesian logistic regression provides robust estimates. We find that subjects emphasize actual contribution more than intended contribution when deciding to fine, but emphasize intended contribution more than actual contribution when deciding to ostracize. We also find that the efficacy of past punishment, in terms of changing the contributions of the punished player, influences the type of punishment selected. Finally, we find that the punishment norms of the automated players affect the punishments performed by the subject. These novel paradigms and analyses indicate that punishment is flexible and adaptive, contrary to some evolutionary theories that predict inflexible punishments that emphasize outcomes.
Authors and Affiliations
Torrin M. Liddell and John K. Kruschke
Synergistic effects of voting and enforcement on internalized motivation to cooperate in a resource dilemma
We used psychological methods to investigate how two prominent interventions, participatory decision making and enforcement, influence voluntary cooperation in a common-pool resource dilemma. Groups (N=40) harvested reso...
The glow of grime: Why cleaning an old object can wash away its value
For connoisseurs of antiques and antiquities, cleaning old objects can reduce their value. In five experiments (total N = 1,019), we show that lay people also often judge that old objects are worth less when cleaned, and...
What do Americans know about inequality? It depends on how you ask them
A recent survey of inequality (Norton and Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6, 9–12) asked respondents to indicate what percent of the nation’s total wealth is—and should be—controlled by richer and poorer q...
The Short Maximization Inventory
We developed the Short Maximization Inventory (SMI) by shortening the Maximization Inventory (Turner, Rim, Betz & Nygren, 2012) from 34 items to 15 items. Using the Item Response Theory framework, we identified and remov...
Repeated judgment sampling: Boundaries
This paper investigates the boundaries of the recent result that eliciting more than one estimate from the same person and averaging these can lead to accuracy gains in judgment tasks. It first examines its generality, a...