Retribution as Revenge and Retribution as Just Deserts

Retribution, Revenge, and the Ungrateful Scholar in Early Chinese Southern Drama

It is only by chance that southern Chinese theater, nanxi 南戲, began its known textual career with two revenge love stories, both concerning ungratefulness and retribution. one, Zhao the Chaste Maid and Second Son Cai (Zhao Zhennü Cai Erlang 趙貞女蔡二郎), has come to us transformed into a dramatic exemplar of duty and filiality, and the other, the story of Wang Kui 王魁, has survived in song and short-...

Retribution and the Experience of Punishment

The Root of Retribution : Coercion or Competition ?

Everyone has experienced injustices and slights, and so approximately everyone has experienced sentiments like anger, resentment, and vengefulness. These are not just feelings. They are also motives; I call them retributive motives. In their grip, one is motivated to confront, retaliate, avenge, or seek retribution, often contrary to better judgment. These motives can be contrasted with prospec...

Retribution in a Cheap-talk Experiment

We use a two-person 3-stage game to investigate whether people choose to punish or reward another player by sacrificing money to increase or decrease the other person’s payoff. One player sends a message indicating an intended play, which is either favorable or unfavorable to the other player in the game. After the message, the sender and the receiver play a simultaneous 2x2 game. A deceptive m...

Blackwater fever: divine retribution or genetic happenstance?

ply of tropical afflictions; and they too were bitten by malariabearing mosquitoes. But the native population, having lived with the menace of malaria for a hundred generations, had inherited a modest measure of resistance to the disease; not so with the white slavers, their soldiers, missionaries or adventurers seeking precious metals. The medical literature of 1830 carried an article by a Fre...