Profitable third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation.

ABSTRACT: Third-party punishment is theorized by some scholars to be essential to the evolution of large-scale cooperation, but empirically, it often fails to bring about its desired effects. Here, we suggest that third-party punishment destabilizes cooperation when third parties have profit motives to punish. Across nine economic games and judgment experiments (including four preregistered studies), we find that when third-party punishment is profitable, rates of cooperation decrease immediately and remain lower even when punishment outcomes are optimized to support cooperative behavior. Profitable third-party punishment causes targets of punishment to anticipate antisocial punishment and perceive social norms in terms of self-interest, suggesting that the introduction of payment degrades the commu

SUBMITTER: Alam R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12403122 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature