Ego-Depletion Promotes Altruistic Punishment

Abstract

To explore whether psychological resource influences the altruistic punishment, Experiment 1 used the Stroop Task to manipulate participants’ self-control resources and the rejection ratio of unfair proposals in the subsequent Ultimate Game was measured to reveal the effect of self-depletion on altruistic punishment. The result of Experiment 1 showed that decline ratio of participants in the high-depletion group was significantly higher than that of participants in the low-depletion group. After manipulation of self-depletion with the Stroop task, participants in experiment 2 acted as the third-party who watched other two participants playing the Dictator Game and could use their own tokens to punish unfair proposals. The result of Experiment 2 showed that participants in the high-depletion group punished unfair proposals significantly more than counterparts in the low-depletion group. In sum, the results of these two experiments showed that ego depletion promoted altruistic punishment.