The association between corporal punishment and children's emotional and behavioral functioning was studied in a sample of 98 non-referred children with a mean age of 12.35 (SD = 1.72) recruited from two school systems in the southeastern United States. Children were divided into those who had experienced no corporal punishment over approximately a two-week period, those who had experienced mil...

This paper provides a comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments. We vary systematically the effectiveness of punishment, that is, the factor by which punishment reduces the punished player’s income, and we find that contributions to the public good increase monotonically in effectiveness. High effectiveness leads to near complete contribution rates and welfare improv...

Neurodevelopmental evidence suggests that children's main decision-making strategy is to avoid options likely to induce punishment. However, the cognitive and affective factors contributing to children's avoidance to high punishment frequency remain unknown. The present study explored psychophysiological, cognitive, and metacognitive processes associated with sensitivity to punishment frequency...

This study examined the prevalence, predictors, and outcomes of spanking and verbal punishment in 2,573 low-income White, African American, and Mexican American toddlers at ages 1, 2, and 3. Both spanking and verbal punishment varied by maternal race/ethnicity. Child fussiness at age 1 predicted spanking and verbal punishment at all 3 ages. Cross-lagged path analyses indicated that spanking (bu...

We examine the effectiveness of the individual-punishment mechanism in larger groups, comparing groups of four to groups of 40 participants. We find that the individual punishment mechanism is remarkably robust when the marginal per capita return (MPCR), i.e. the return to each participant from each dollar that is contributed, is held constant. Moreover, the efficiency gains from the punishment...

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their ndings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and self-contained episodes of interaction, we disentangle the e ects of retaliation and norm-related punishment...

This paper experimentally investigates the effects of a costly punishment option on cooperation and social welfare in long, finitely repeated public good contribution games. In a perfect monitoring environment, increasing the severity of the potential punishment monotonically increases both contributions and the average net payoffs of subjects. In a more realistic imperfect monitoring environme...

The social welfare provided by cooperation depends on the enforcement of social norms. Determining blameworthiness and assigning a deserved punishment are two cognitive cornerstones of norm enforcement. Although prior work has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in norm-based judgments, the relative contribution of this region to blameworthiness and punishment decisions remain...

While empirical evidence highlights the importance of punishment for cooperation in collective action, it remains disputed how responsible sanctions targeted predominantly at uncooperative subjects can evolve. Punishment is costly; in order to spread it typically requires local interactions, voluntary participation, or rewards. Moreover, theory and experiments indicate that some subjects abuse ...

The current research examines a moderator who predicts in what situations punishment can have detrimental effects on cooperation. We hypothesized that when a punishment system is perceived as procedurally unfair, people's cooperation level decreases. Results of two experiments indicated that participants cooperated less in a group-based trust game when punishment was inconsistent between person...