Punishing the “Others”

Punishing greediness in Divide-the-dollar games

Brams and Taylor (1994) presented a version of the Divide-the-dollar game (DD), which they call DD1. DD1 suffers from the following drawback: when each player demands approximately the entire dollar, then if the least greedy player is unique, then this player obtains approximately the entire dollar even if he is only slightly less greedy than the other players. I introduce a parametrized family...

Punishing Collective Entities

Punishing Disposition: Sting Operations on the Internet

Given the pervasiveness of illicit pornography on the Internet, pedophiles can easily and quickly access the objects of their sexual preferences, utilizing the unlimited potential of the Internet to lure an unprecedented number of victims. Meanwhile, unrestrained access to supposedly prohibited sites also makes it possible for law enforcement authorities to conduct sting operations designed to ...

Punishing and abstaining for public goods.

The evolution of cooperation within sizable groups of nonrelated humans offers many challenges for our understanding. Current research has highlighted two factors boosting cooperation in public goods interactions, namely, costly punishment of defectors and the option to abstain from the joint enterprise. A recent modeling approach has suggested that the autarkic option acts as a catalyzer for t...

The influence of group membership and individual differences in psychopathy and perspective taking on neural responses when punishing and rewarding others.

Understanding how neural processes involved in punishing and rewarding others are altered by group membership and personality traits is critical in order to gain a better understanding of how socially important phenomena such as racial and group biases develop. Participants in an fMRI study (n = 48) gave rewards (money) or punishments (electroshocks) to in-group or out-group members. The result...