• In five bargaining games, proposers could blame unfair proposals on a coin flip. • Responders did not believe that proposers actually let the coin decide. • Responders and third parties were less punitive when the coin was blamed. • People generally refrain from punishing if guilt cannot be proved beyond doubt. • Unwillingness to punish when in doubt could explain the prevalence of hypocrisy....

Scholars in economics and psychology have created a large literature studying reward, punishment and reciprocity. Labor markets constitute a popular application of this body of work, with particular emphasis on how reciprocity helps regulate workplace relationships where managers are unable to perfectly monitor workers. We study how idiosyncratic features of the labor market (compared to most s...

When enforcing norms for cooperative behavior, human adults sometimes exhibit in-group bias. For example, third-party observers punish selfish behaviors committed by out-group members more harshly than similar behaviors committed by in-group members. Although evidence suggests that children begin to systematically punish selfish behavior around the age of 6 y, the development of in-group bias i...

Human social interactions are regulated by moral norms that define individual obligations and rights. These norms are enforced by punishment of transgressors and reward of followers. Yet, the generality and strength of this drive to punish or reward is unclear, especially when people are not personally involved in the situation and when the actual impact of their sanction is only indirect, i.e....

Cooperation has long been an enigma in the life and social sciences. A possible explanation for the phenomenon is the recently developed idea of strong reciprocity in which agents altruistically reward those that cooperate and altruistically punish those that do not. The acts are altruistic in the sense that when agents punish or reward they incur a cost but receive no material benefit. Both ex...

Humans display an intriguing propensity to help the victim of social norm violations or punish the violators which require theory-of-mind (ToM)/mentalizing abilities. The hypothalamic peptide oxytocin (OXT) has been implicated in modulating various pro-social behaviors/perception including trust, cooperation, and empathy. However, it is still elusive whether OXT also influences neural responses...

We conduct a laboratory experiment to study the incentives of a privileged group to share political power with another group when the two have conflicting interests. There are two groups of participants, the “yellows” and the “blues”. The yellows collectively choose the voting rule for a general election: a simplemajority rule that favors them, or a proportional rule. In two control treatments ...