Individual differences in motives for costly punishment.

ABSTRACT: Costly punishment is thought to be a key mechanism sustaining human cooperation. However, the motives for punitive behaviour remain unclear. Although often assumed to be motivated by a desire to convert cheats into cooperators, punishment is also consistent with other functions, such as levelling payoffs or improving one's relative position. We used six economic games to tease apart different motives for punishment and to explore whether different punishment strategies were associated with personality variables, political ideology, and religiosity. We used representative samples from the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 2010) to estimate the frequency of different punishment strategies in the population. The most common strategy was to never punish. For people who did punish, stra

SUBMITTER: Claessens S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12852156 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature