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Science 7 March 2008:
Vol. 319. no. 5868, pp. 1362 - 1367
DOI: 10.1126/science.1153808
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Research Articles

Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

Benedikt Herrmann,1 Christian Thöni,2 Simon Gächter1*

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.

1 Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham, School of Economics, Sir Clive Granger Building, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, UK.
2 University of St. Gallen, FEW-HSG, Varnbuelstrasse 14, CH-9000 St. Gallen, Switzerland.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: simon.gaechter{at}nottingham.ac.uk

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)