The Influence Of Rule Violator's Social Economic Status On Third-party Punishment

In the process of the development of human society,the sanctions towards those who violate the norms was not only through the retaliation of the direct victims,but also some third-party law enforcers to punish those who violate the rules.Faced with the limited information social interaction situation,the third party's behaviors usually are affected by the offender who breaks the norms.In many categories of identity information,economic status usually plays a primary role in the process of representation.This study adopted the third-party punishment game based on the Dictator Game to carry out three experiments to systematically explore the specific impact of the social and economic status of the violator of the rules on the third-party punishment and the cognitive and neural mechanisms behind it.Study 1 considered the social economic status of the third party,both the second party(the receiver)and the third party are controlled to the middle class.By manipulating the economic status of the allocator(the rich / middle / poor),the influence of the economic status of the allocator on the third-party punishment behavior is explored.Study 2 focused on the difference between the rich and the poor,and used the EEG technology to explore the neural activities of the third party when observing the distribution of the poor or the rich to the recipients as the middle class.Study 3 further validates the possible explanation design experiment of EEG effect,trying to explain the deep reason of the occurrence and change of the third-party punishment behavior under the influence of the economic status of the allocator.The results of Study 1 show that:(1)The more unfair the distribution,the more the third-party punishment behavior,the greater the punishment intensity;(2)Facing unfair distribution,the third-party punishment behavior increases with the improvement of the social status of the violator(the rich > the middle > the poor);(3)The difference of punishment rate will not change with the increase of the degree of unfairness.The difference of punishment intensity between the poor and the rich will increase with the increase of the degree of unfairness.In Study 2,the poor allocator made extreme unfair distribution,compared with the middle unfair and fair distribution,will lead to greater P2.This result may be related to the third aspect's sympathy process for different economic status allocators.Study 3 showed that anger plays a partial mediating role in predicting the punishment rate for the rich allocator at the unfair level;while for the poor allocators,anger and sympathy together play a partial mediating role in predicting the punishment rate at the unfair level.To sum up,this study systematically explores the impact of the economic status of the rule violators on the third-party punishment,and finally finds that the socio-economic status of the allocators does have an impact on the third party punishment,which helps us to further understand the social stratum's impact on the third party behavior under the unfair situation.We believe that the economic status of violators may affect the behavior of third parties.