Claessens, Scott;
Atkinson, Quentin D;
Raihani, Nichola J;
(2026)
Individual differences in motives for costly punishment.
Communications Psychology
10.1038/s44271-025-00372-w.
(In press).
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Abstract
Costly punishment is thought to be a key mechanism sustaining human cooperation. However, the motives for punitive behaviour remain unclear. Although often assumed to be motivated by a desire to convert cheats into cooperators, punishment is also consistent with other functions, such as levelling payoffs or improving one’s relative position. We used six economic games to tease apart different motives for punishment and to explore whether different punishment strategies were associated with personality variables, political ideology, and religiosity. We used representative samples from the United Kingdom and the United States (N = 2010) to estimate the frequency of different punishment strategies in the population. The most common strategy was to never punish. For people who did punish, strategy use was more consistent with egalitarian motives than behaviour-change motives. Nevertheless, different punishment strategies were also associated with personality, social preferences, political ideology, and religiosity. Self-reports of behaviour in the games suggested that people have some insight into their punishment strategy. These findings highlight the multipurpose nature of human punishment and show how the different motives underpinning punishment decisions are linked with core character traits.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Individual differences in motives for costly punishment |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s44271-025-00372-w |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00372-w |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Economics, Human behaviour, Social evolution |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10220427 |
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