The Importance of Emotions for the Effectiveness of Social Punishment

This paper experimentally explores how the enforcement of cooperative behavior in a social dilemma is facilitated through institutional as well as emotional mechanisms. Recent studies emphasize the importance of anger and its role in motivating individuals to punish free riders. However, we find that anger also triggers retaliatory behavior by the punished individuals. This makes the enforcement of a cooperative norm more costly. We show that in addition to anger, ‘social’ emotions like guilt need to be present for punishment to be an effective deterrent of uncooperative actions. They play a key role by subduing the desire of punished individuals to retaliate and by motivating them to behave more cooperatively in the future. First version: July 2005 This version: March 2006 JEL Codes: Z13, C92, D74, H41 * We would like to thank Sam Bowles, Dirk Engelmann, Nikos Nikiforakis, Arno Riedl, Arthur Schram, Martine Visser, and Frans van Winden for useful comments and suggestions. § CISA, University of Geneva, email: [email protected]. ∝ University of Copenhagen, email: [email protected].