Humans show a rare tendency to punish norm-violators who have not harmed them directly-a behavior known as third-party punishment. Research has found that third-party punishment is subject to intergroup bias, whereby people punish members of the out-group more severely than the in-group. Although the prevalence of this behavior is well-documented, the psychological processes underlying it remai...

Within contemporary penal philosophy, the view that punishment can only be justified if the offender is a moral agent who is responsible and hence blameworthy for their offence is one of the few areas on which a consensus prevails. In recent literature, this precept is associated with the retributive tradition, in the modern form of 'just deserts'. Turning its back on the rehabilitative ideal, ...

The human ability to establish cooperation, even in large groups of genetically unrelated strangers, depends upon the enforcement of cooperation norms. Third-party punishment is one important factor to explain high levels of cooperation among humans, although it is still somewhat disputed whether other animal species also use this mechanism for promoting cooperation. We study the effectiveness ...

disproportionate punishments are those punishments passed or enforced without considering the criteria of proportionality, namely the criteria of harm done, the absolute or relative seriousness of crimes, the kind of committed crime and offender characteristics, the degree and kind of victim’s culpability. considering the penological aims, such as retribution, deterrence and securing social def...

Conflicts of interest between the community and its members are at the core of human social dilemmas. If observed selfishness has future costs, individuals may hide selfish acts but display altruistic ones, and peers aim at identifying the most selfish persons to avoid them as future social partners. An interaction involving hiding and seeking information may be inevitable. We staged an experim...

In the prevention and resolution of conflicts in social contexts, an important step is to understand how different emotions and empathic traits are linked to punishment behaviors. Unfortunately, few paradigms exist to study these phenomena. Here, we developed the Inequality Game (IG) as an economic and verbal interaction paradigm in which participants are faced with an "unfair other" as opposed...