Examining Consequentialist Punishment Motives in One-Shot Social Dilemmas

Abstract

We investigated whether consequentialist motives may underlie punishment decisions in single-round (i.e., one-shot) social dilemmas in which there is no prospect of reciprocity. In particular, we used an incentivized public goods game to examine how the prospect of receiving information on the effect of punishment (i.e., information that indicates potential regret and intention for future behavioral change on the part of the transgressor) affects people s punishment decisions. We also took person-situation interactions into account and studied whether prosocial individuals (i.e., persons high in Honesty-Humility and Social Value Orientation) punish more strongly when they receive consequentialist information. The data did neither reveal the hypothesized effects of information availability on punishment decisions nor were these effects conditional on dispositional prosociality. We discuss potential limitations of these findings as well as open questions for future research.