A research team has created a new experimental game to investigate whether people steer clear of witnessing selfish behavior to avoid punishing others or simply to dodge unpleasant situations. The findings reveal that this avoidance stems from wanting to ignore inequality and from the desire to avoid confrontation, indicating that altruistic punishment may happen less frequently in real-world scenarios than previously thought.
How would you feel if someone cut in front of you in line? Some individuals may choose to remind others about the importance of waiting their turn, even if it doesn’t impact them directly. This behavior is referred to as altruistic punishment, where individuals penalize others for selfish acts without expecting anything in return.
Past research on altruistic punishment typically involved participants in structured settings that forced them to witness others’ selfish behavior and decide on punishment. However, in day-to-day life, many individuals may prioritize avoiding such scenarios rather than confronting them. This means someone might choose to ignore a line cutter entirely. Recent studies indicate that when given a chance to decide whether to see others act selfishly, people are more inclined to look away.
To explore this further, graduate student Kodai Mitsuishi and Associate Professor Yuta Kawamura from Osaka Metropolitan University’s Graduate School of Sustainable System Sciences examined whether people avoid witnessing selfish actions to escape the responsibility of punishment or because they simply want to avoid dealing with such behavior. They designed a specialized third-party punishment game called the situation-selective third-party punishment game (SS-TPPG) for their study.
In the SS-TPPG, participants repeatedly selected from two decks of cards—fair and unfair—with each offering varying chances of earning fair and unfair monetary payouts for two players. This setup mirrored real-life situations where individuals might observe injustice. Furthermore, the researchers adjusted the available punishment choices for participants to see how these changes affected their willingness to confront or sidestep unfair actions. Their results demonstrated that the desire to avoid selfishness is spurred by both the wish to overlook inequality and the preference to prevent conflict.
Interestingly, the study also found that participants who generally tend to avoid unfairness were still likely to deliver punishment when they were obliged to observe it. Additionally, when participants had the chance to impose indirect punishment, they were less likely to shun unfair circumstances.
“The outcomes of this research indicate that altruistic punishment, often reported in earlier studies, might not be as prevalent in real-life situations,” stated Mitsuishi.
“In the future, it will be important to explore factors that reduce selfish behavior and promote a cooperative society without relying on altruistic punishment,” concluded Professor Kawamura.
The study’s results were published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
