Third-party Punishment As A Costly Signal Of Moral Quality

Third-party punishment(TPP),in which unaffected observers punish selfishness,promotes cooperation by deterring defection(Fehr & Fischbacher,2004;Jordan,Hoffman,Bloom,& Rand,2016).No obvious benefits derived from this other-regarding behavior poses a puzzle: why should individuals bear the costs of punishment? Costly signaling theory(CST)proposes that individuals invest costs in terms of time,energy,risk or money to convey information about desirable personal traits that are otherwise unobservable.Elevated reputation increases third-party's status(Hardy & Van Vugt,2006)and makes them more attractive partners in subsequent interactions(Barclay,2006).Long-term benefits of signaling desirable personal traits will pay off the costs of punishing.Costly signal approach focuses on evolutionary advantage of third-party punishers,but nonetheless overlooks the disadvantage of non-punishers,which sometimes may perform as a more experienced usher to guide the evolutionary navigation of human being.In the current graduation project,we propose that third-party punishment is moral relevant,furthermore driven by both the desire to signal favorable traits(positive signaling)and the fear of signaling unfavorable traits(negative signaling),which will expand the scope of CST.Empirical findings have confirmed that the effect of positive signaling is cost-dependent.The more that an individual is willing to invest into signaling behavior,the more reliably this conveys information that is advantageous also to receivers.This implicates that receivers judge positive signalers in a consequentialist(Bentham,1879/1983;Mill,1863)way,and actually it is(e.g.,Nelissen,2008).The Negativity bias(for reviews,see Baumeister,Bratslavsky,Finkenauer,& Vohs,2001)informs that the effect of negative signaling should be insensitive to the incurred costs and the receivers would judge signalers based on deontological theories(Kant,1797/2002;Scanlon,1998).To testify the aforementioned signaling asymmetry hypothesis is the second aim of the current project.Morality is originally evolved to restrain individuals from behaving in selfish ways,thus sustain cooperation to facilitate group living(Baumard et al.,2013;Gintis et al.,2008;Haidt,2007,2008;Haidt & Kesebir,2010;Krebs,2008).This is accounted by empirical findings that most of the variance of impressions of persons is explained by perceptions of morality and competence(Wojciszke,2005).Considering that moral judgement and impressions are of critical importance for surviving,the content of these two dimensions constitute an ideal research framework to testify the abovementioned hypotheses.In Study 1,we conducted vignette experiment based on dictator game and adopted a single factor between-subject design to examine the impact of third-party's decision-making(punish or not)on impartial observer's moral judgement of third-party.The results showed that third-party punisher was judged as more moral than non-punisher and counterpart in the control condition,third-party non-punisher was judged as more immoral than punisher and counterpart in the control condition.This preliminarily confirmed third-party punishment was moral relevant.In Study 2,we adopted an identical design except basing on public good game,in which different characteristics have equivalent power to determine their own outcome,to replicate the findings of Study and test whether third-party punishment would affect observers' competence judgement.The results were generally consistent with Study 1 when controlling for liking,thus excluded threatens of the halo effect(Nisbett & Wilson,1977)or the mere liking effect(Bocian,Baryla,Kulesza,Schnall,& Wojciszke,2018).We also found that third-party punishment didn't affect observer's competence judgement.In Study 3,we reverse the experimental logic,manipulating the information about third-party's moral character and then asking participants to draw inferences about the punishment level toward defector,which aim to strengthen the casual link between third-party punishment and moral judgement.The results showed that participants inferred that moral third-party would exhibit higher level of altruistic punishment than immoral third-party.In Study 4,we adopted a 2(abundant initial money vs limited initial money)× 2(high punishment ratio vs low punishment ratio)between-subject design to investigate how competence features(cost of punishment)of third-party affect the negative signaling effect.The results demonstrated that participants would judge the third-party non-punishers as the same immoral disregarding the cost of punishment,which confirm the signaling asymmetry hypothesis.To summarize,the conclusions are as following:(1)Third-party punishment is moral relevant.Third-party who would like to punish defectors will be judged morally good and who refuse to punish will be judged morally bad,and vice versa.(2)There exists an asymmetry between positive and negative signaling.Impartial Observers' moral judgement of third-party non-punisher tend to be characteristically deontological,which is opposite to the moral judgment of third-party punisher following consequentialist theories.