Convergent evidence for detrimental effects of punishment on cooperation has been obtained in a wide variety of environments, ranging from American students facing punishment in laboratory experiments to Israeli parents facing fines for arriving late to their child‟s day care. We show here that enhancing the norm salience role of punishment can eliminate its detrimental effects. In a public goo...

Since American legislatures began passing bias crime statutes (which set more severe penalties for crimes committed from biased motives) in the 1980s, many legal philosophers have argued that such statutes are unjust on the grounds that they punish character traits and feelings rather than actions and intentions. It is unjust to punish character traits and feelings, these authors have supposed,...

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances, revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender, whereas those who do not punish “move on” and think less about the offender, and (b) people ...

Altruistic punishment occurs when an agent incurs a cost to punish another but receives no material benefit for doing so. Despite the seeming irrationality of such behavior, humans in laboratory settings routinely pay to punish others even in anonymous, one-shot settings. Costly punishment is ubiquitous among social organisms in general and is increasingly accepted as a mechanism for the evolut...