title: Does dishonesty really invite third-party punishment? Results of a more stringent test.
abstract: Many experiments have demonstrated that people are willing to incur cost to punish norm violators even when they are not directly harmed by the violation. Such altruistic third-party punishment is often considered an evolutionary underpinning of large-scale human cooperation. However, some scholars argue that previously demonstrated altruistic third-party punishment against fairness-norm violations may be an experimental artefact. For example, envy-driven retaliatory behaviour (i.e. spite) towards better-off unfair game players may be misidentified as altruistic punishment. Indeed, a recent experiment demonstrated that participants ceased to inflict third-party punishment against an unfair player once a series of key methodological problems were systematically controlled for. Noticing that a previous finding regarding apparently altruistic third-party punishment against honesty-norm violations may have been subject to methodological issues, we used a different and what we consider to be a more sound design to evaluate these findings. Third-party punishment against dishonest players withstood this more stringent test.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, 1-1 Rokkodai-cho, Nada, Kobe 657-8501, Japan.
authors.forename: Naoki
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Konishi
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, 1-1 Rokkodai-cho, Nada, Kobe 657-8501, Japan yohtsubo@lit.kobe-u.ac.jp.
authors.forename: Yohsuke
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2074-0244
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Ohtsubo
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000533:Altruism; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D005260:Female; D005717:Games, Experimental; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011678:Punishment; D014342:Truth Disclosure
keywords: experimental artefacts; norms of honesty; third-party punishment